


Fallen Stars

by Nasserwraith



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Canon Divergence - Castlevania (Cartoon) Season 3, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon: Castlevania (Cartoon 2017), Dark, Eventual Romance, Human/Vampire Relationship, Multi, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Rough Sex, Threesome - F/M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, Vampires, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 50,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23562901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nasserwraith/pseuds/Nasserwraith
Summary: Castlevania (Season 1/2): Alucard, Trevor Belmont, and Sypha Belnades are on the trail of Dracula and his castle. Trevor is skeptical of the dhampir in their midst but Sypha has been thinking: What if all this is more than just an opportunity to take on one of the most fearsome vampire lords in history? She has a plan but, like so many others, it doesn't go as expected. Now, there's something else brewing between the three of them that speaks to other, deeper, issues. What if the real darkness of the world does not live in a moving castle but in the hearts of those who would seek to destroy it?Warning: Castlevania is canonically flawed, violent, and uncertain. That will be reflected here. This story involves a take on Trevor as a dark character, on Alucard as struggling with the dominance of a hunter who seeks to possess him in relation to submission to his own vampiric nature, and on Sypha as caught between them. It's written as erotica but not as a classic romance. As such, if you are not interested in complex consent (though not Non-Con as it is defined), rough sex, or dominance/submission; please do not read it.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya & Trevor Belmont & Sypha Belnades, Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont, Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades
Comments: 127
Kudos: 159





	1. The Overture

**Fallen Stars**  
Castlevania Drabbles for Trevor, Alucard, and Sypha

_“A comet is a person that passes through your life repeatedly for short periods of deep and intense connection, followed by longer periods of distance. The relationship has little enmeshment and rarely contains ongoing obligations.” – Love Uncommon_

**The Overture**

Life on the road with Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades was like a dress rehearsal for an opening night drama. Every day, Alucard practiced emotions he didn’t remotely feel and hid the others that he truly did. And every night, he schooled his features into a mask of neutrality that effectively hid the terror slowly growing inside of his soul. So, when the curtains went up and the call to action sounded, he presented his well-curated persona to the waiting audience; and to Trevor and Sypha, with whom he shared the stage, he was a man who never broke character such that it was unclear as to whether it was really all an act or not.

Three months now. Three months since Gresit. Three months awake and in the company of a dynastic vampire hunter and a nomadic Speaker woman on the trail of his father and his cursed castle.

What a scene. What an ensemble.

What a mess.

And yet, Alucard couldn’t help but admit that he’d begun to grow fond of the pair. He’d never really had friends growing up and, as uncouth and uncultured as one of them in particular might be, Trevor and Sypha were the most intimate companions he’d ever known.

 _Intimate_. Alucard scoffed at himself. What a word to come into his mind at such a time as this.

The tavern was a rustic one but reasonably quiet, all told. The three of them did not often spend the night at inns, preferring to keep to the road with the wagon, sleeping under the stars and away from the prying eyes of townsfolk whose religious sensibilities were anything but charitable. But tonight, a harsh cold front had moved in on the wake of a thunderhead and it was pouring rain out. A hissing, crackling, din of white-walled sheeting and the heavy pelting of drops flooding down from the inconsolable Heavens. It was sadly typical for Wallachia at this time of year but even as a child, Alucard had found the storms of this land to be especially frightening. Less vagaries of climate than unholy demons possessing the clouds and warring across the sky with a cannonade of drumfire.

Furthermore, and even more unfortunately, given the poor weather, it also appeared that everyone else in the countryside had had the same idea and the tavern was only able to offer the three of them a single room. Two beds at least, but only one small space in the upper corner of the second floor.

And that was how Adrian Țepeș, called Alucard, had come to be sharing a bed with Trevor Belmont.  
The irony was palpable.

Sypha, being the only woman in their little cadre, was currently enjoying the comforts of the second pallet on the other side of the room; having made it clear that the two of them were welcome to a bed… as long as it was not hers.

Normally, Alucard would have demurred in this situation and remained outside. But even though he didn’t need to worry so much about physical cold, wet, and exposure, cowering in the muck all night during a tempest was ill-advised even to vampire-kin. He wasn’t truly undead after all, and while he was resistant to most human frailties, he was not necessarily immune to them. Which meant that, right now, he was lying awake, flat on his back and staring at the ceiling, listening to the low, soft, snores and other murmurs that informed him that Trevor was well and genuinely asleep next to him and that Sypha was having dreams about frog ponds. 

Alucard sighed. It had already been a long night and wasn’t relishing the idea of several more hours like this.

Trevor had initially complained about the arrangement, of course, but one pointed look from Sypha and he’d grumbled his way onto the other mattress with only a minimal amount of vulgarity. This surprised Alucard somewhat. Not so much Trevor’s rather restrained use of colorful curses in this case but more so that he’d been noting a growing affection between his two traveling companions as of late. A physical closeness communicated in furtive touches and shy glances, in passive insults and playful banter. They clearly were developing warm feelings for one another; bonding over their shared trials as humans often did. It just must not have turned sexual yet, Alucard mused. No wonder the Belmont hunter had been so much more aggravating than usual lately. His preferred bedmate was not the one he was currently stuck with.

For the dhampir’s part, it was only that he was so completely unaccustomed to being this physically close to another person. He could feel the heat from the hunter’s body, smell the salt on his skin, and hear the faint rhythm of his heartbeat as he tossed and turned in the bedclothes. Every now and again, his fitful sleep would cause Trevor to nearly roll into him and when he did, Alucard would find unconscious fingers brushing along his leg or scratching at his hip. He didn’t dare nudge him back over when this happened, however. Even the most benign touch from one such as him might trigger the Belmont’s self-protective instincts and end the night with a knife in the dhampir’s throat.

Alucard huffed and rolled onto his side, facing away from both hunter and Speaker. He tried willing himself to sleep but it didn’t seem particularly forthcoming. A sharp crack of thunder shook the entire building and the rain only seemed to be coming down harder. Trevor sniffled and then swore. He swore. In his sleep. Some manner of invented profanity that seemed to be a portmanteau of horse-raising terminology and urination. Alucard sighed and shifted again, soon lost in thought as he stared passively ahead at the intricate wood grain of the planks on the wall. “Pisskidney knobjockey” indeed.

He must have dozed at some point though, because Alucard slowly came awake to an odd sensation. Points of gentle pressure were moving down his back, from just beneath the nape of his neck, tracing the line of his spine, to the rise of muscle just above the flat of his tailbone. The pressure then changed from what must have been fingertips to a wide palm that began to knead the tension below his ribs. The hand then dropped and deftly caressed his backside. Alucard gasped and froze.

“Relax.” A hard, irritated, voice growled behind him. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“What the…what do you think you’re doing, Belmont?” Alucard hissed in reply. He was still a little fuzzy around the edges and wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t just some bad dream.

“The fuck does it feel like I’m doing?”

Not a dream.

Alucard made a slightly undignified noise. A moment ago, everything had been quiet, a moment ago he had been in calm reverie; pondering the imponderabilia of his everyday life, skirting the boundaries of sleep in a shitty back-country tavern with two people he was pretty sure didn’t like him very much. And now, for some reason, one of those people was touching him. Intimately.

“Get your hands off of me, Belmont.” For some reason, Alucard’s deeply ingrained sense of decorum kept his voice low. The last thing he wanted to do right now was to wake Sypha or cause a ruckus in the tavern below.

To his surprise, however, his threatening tone was met with an amused chuckle and a hot puff of breath near the back of his neck. “Don’t be a brat, Adrian. Now hold still.”

Alucard was about to protest. Vehemently. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to say, but damn it all he was certainly going to say something spiteful. How dare the hunter presume so much! How dare he touch him like this! Without warning and without asking. The fires of rage flared in Alucard’s chest at the familiar use of his name, at the hand massaging his thigh, at the press of a hard, powerful, body at his back. He drew in a deep breath and opened his mouth in reproach…but all that came out…was a harsh catch and an absolutely unseemly moan.

With remarkably dexterous ease, Trevor Belmont had managed to loosen the ties at the front of Alucard pants and had slipped his hand past his waistband to boldly stroke him directly; murmuring approvingly when the dhampir immediately grew hard in his palm. Alucard, on the other hand, was certain he had just completely lost his mind (either or both of them, actually). His hands went to the wall in front of him, his deadly claws extending and scrabbling for purchase on the well-varnished wood. When Trevor’s opposite hand came up to tangle into his hair, he didn’t try to stop him but bent his head back against the other man’s chest in response to the leading tug that followed.

The dhampir’s breathing stuttered and hitched as his hips began to helplessly undulate to the rhythm of the hand that stoked him with a sure, tight, grip. Had he gone insane? Was he imagining this?! Was this some kind of terror and exhaustion induced nightmare he’d be absolutely mortified to awaken from? It certainly felt real. Too real.

“Wha…. why?” He finally managed to breathe through quick pants.

“Are you serious?” Came the whispered response. “Between you and Sypha, I can’t tell what’s worse. Her coy flirting and teasing or your obvious cravings. I figure that pretty soon, you’ll be as feral as I’m starting to feel. Get yourself wound up any tighter and you’ll explode. Besides, I haven’t come in weeks and if I don’t get off soon, I’ll be pinning one of you to the floor before the week is out. Probably better to be you right now, considering.”

“I…Oh…Trev…Trevor…. please…don’t…”

“I told you. Relax. I’ll get you off too. I’m not that much of a shithead.”

The strokes came harder and quicker, causing Alucard to arch his back and shudder against the one holding him. He’d touched himself before naturally, but the feel of another person fondling him was so unexpectedly arousing, it was provoking his darker instincts onto a desperate edge. He was torn now, between demanding that the hunter stop this indignity at once and begging him for more. He could already feel the tense coil of an approaching orgasm tightening in his abdomen and it was riding on such a forceful wave that Alucard already feared that he was going to cry out rather loudly when it hit him.

He could also feel his fangs beginning to lengthen and the snarl that was forming deep in his throat was nothing short of primal. But he had to stop Trevor from finishing him. He didn’t think he could take it. He didn’t think he could prevent himself from turning on the human in a frenzied moment of abandon if he brought him over the edge like this.

“Trevor stop please…” The words tumbled out of him with another wanton moan. He could also still feel the hunter pressed against his backside, getting some much-desired friction on his own considerable erection still fully clothed. But to Alucard’s relief, Trevor paused his strokes, though he didn’t exactly let go of him.

“Why?” The question was a challenge.

Alucard licked his lips in an attempt to get his voice to work again. “Because…because I…I can’t. I might…hurt you…if…”

“Hrphm.” Alucard felt the other man shift uncomfortably behind him. “No self-control, huh?”

“I beg your pardon!? You were the one who…”

Trevor snorted. “Fucking vampires. All seduction and sex until it actually comes down to getting the job done. And then you just _faaall_ apart, don’t you?”

The words that came out of Alucard’s mouth in response were not specifically the ones he intended but he couldn’t suppress the fit of pique that suddenly took hold of him. What he meant to say was something along the lines of not being that kind of vampire, nor of making a habit of beguiling and deceiving human prey in that way. Or at all, really. But what we said was…

“Trevor. I have never done this before.”

A strange silence fell as the hunter slowly released the captive dhampir and slid back; leaving him still breathing heavily and braced up against the wall, his pants low on his hips and a salacious bit of pale skin showing beneath the hem of his white shirt. For several long moments, the Belmont hunter didn’t answer him but rather sat back to glare at Alucard’s back while the dhampir self-consciously tried to right his clothing and hide what little of his body that had been revealed. When Alucard didn’t turn to face him, he finally gave voice to his thoughts.

“What?”

Somewhat calmer than before, the dhampir turned his head only slightly to regard his bedmate. “You misread me, Belmont.” He said shakily. “I have never attempted such things. I would not. It wasn’t really…that is, I didn’t…”

“Yeah, but…. you literally grew up in Dracula’s castle, right? Like, noble courts and servants and really depraved rich people doing all kinds of really depraved rich people shit?”

Alucard chuffed but shivered with a few unbidden memories. “My mother forbade all that. Completely proscribed within our household. She was adamant that I never be subjected to such debauched profligacy.”

Trevor was pretty sure he only knew what half of those words actually meant. But he got the gist of the general idea. “Ok, fine. But you’ve, you know, fucked? Yeah?”

Again, an interminable stretch of silence.

“No.”

“Well……shit.”

Alucard still couldn’t bring himself to face the other and instead, curled slightly in on himself as he tried to stifle the overwhelming sense of shame he felt creeping into his face. He was still hard though, and it was becoming just this side of painful to deal with both his own humiliation at having been rendered insensate with just a few indelicate strokes and the fact that he could do absolutely nothing about it for the moment. At least, not with Trevor still staring at him like that and, from what he could hear, Sypha still asleep a few feet away. He felt over-sensitive everywhere. His skin prickled at the continued nearness of the other man, his mouth still hungered for a taste of heated flesh, his heightened senses still keen on every breath and touch, and a significant part of his body quite interested in finishing what had been started.

“I’m sorry.”

That…was not what he had been expecting to hear. 

“Fuck, Alucard…I didn’t think that in a million years you’d actually be a…damn. A virgin.”

The snuffle that came in response may have been directed at him. Maybe not. But the soft, embarrassed, words spoken to the darkness of the room certainly were. “Just forget about it.”

Trevor squinted as a flash of lightening gave him just enough light to see the bluish outline of Alucard’s form huddled into the wall, the subtle shivers along his back cluing him in on some of what was bothering the dhampir. At least, in the immediate sense.

“Hey.” He said, still careful to keep his volume low; both again so as not to alert Sypha but also not to mortify Alucard further. When he reached out to tentatively rest his hand on his shoulder, the dhampir tensed. But when Trevor sidled up even closer behind him, he heard Alucard suddenly hold a sharp breath.

With incredible gentleness, the hunter reached up to steady the dhampir’s hip and to begin rubbing lazy circles onto the base of his spine with his thumb. Laying his lips against the back of Alucard’s neck, Trevor smiled. “I’m a fucking asshole, OK? Just an all-around piece of shit. So why don’t you let me make it up to you and take care of that?”

This was not at all how Alucard had expected this night to go. He really should just be lying here, staring at the ceiling, and angrily ruminating on his plans for patricide. But when that warm, sure, hand once again began to drift across the flat of his belly and towards the waistband of his pants, he stiffened and made to object.

“Shhhh…” 

Genial breath at his ear. Tender, almost loving, caresses to his skin, and Alucard felt the words die in his throat for a second time. Trevor Belmont, last of the Belmont hunters, was pressed fully up against his back; one hand sliding between the dhampir’s body and the bed to pull his chest back so that Alucard could lay against him and the other slipping beneath the soft cloth of his pants to wrap around his manhood again. Thus, cradled in Trevor’s larger body, back to front, Alucard felt himself drawn once more into an aching, wanting, kind of pleasure that left him breathless and almost sobbing as the sensual rhythm began all over.

“It’s OK.” He heard the hunter whisper. “It’s OK, Adrian. Just let me take care of you.”

When Trevor felt Alucard offer up the first tentative thrust into his hand, he smiled and used the opportunity to begin mouthing along the side of the slender, bared, neck. When Alucard moaned and reflexively brought his own hand down to grasp onto the hunter’s wrist as he pleasured him, Trevor decided to push his luck a little more. With careful teeth, he began to bite small marks into the dhampir’s throat and into the juncture of his shoulder.

Alucard was falling apart. The feeling of the hunter stroking him again, but with gentler movements than before, had him trembling with need and the mouth at his neck was only adding to the thorns of arousal tearing their way through him. This was, quite frankly, his very first sexual experience with another person and he felt as though he were simply unraveling at the seams. As Trevor continued to pleasure him; his grip firm and knowing, Alucard felt his body begin to undulate. Rolling with the movement in a way that felt instinctive and necessary.

“Yeah, baby.” Trevor chuckled breathlessly. “Just like that.”

The dhampir was fascinating to him, though he would be hard pressed to admit it publicly. What he knew about vampires was mainly learned from his family’s legends and teachings, or from the few books he’d managed to peruse as a teenager. Slender but strong, pale as moonlight, smooth as silk to the touch, but deadly even at rest; he’d never let on that he found them beautiful…and an insane turn-on. Not the evil, genocidal, death cult part of the whole equation, of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, vampires appealed to his baser appetites in all the worst ways. He had just never in his life expected to meet one that just might…be available to exploration. And then he’d met Alucard.

Now, with the irascible dhampir flushed and gasping in his arms, Trevor had only one regret: that he’d completely misjudged his erstwhile companion in this regard. In all honesty, he’d figured Alucard for someone who at least occasionally indulged in the erotic. With who knows who or who knows what (he didn’t even want to speculate), but a casual sort of lover. What with his history and background and all. Hence, his interest in pursuing a bit of relief with him tonight. If he’d known the truth, he would have been more…romantic, maybe. Ok, maybe not romantic but at least not quite so much of a brute. Regardless, that Alucard was unspoiled made him wild with desire and the fact that he seemed to be acquiescing to his touch was even better. He needed to be gentle though. Take his time with this. He had an idea.

With as much careful direction as he could manage, Trevor released Alucard and sat up so that he could lay the dhampir onto his back. He detected a soft whine upon removing his hand from the other’s swollen arousal but Alucard fell back without complaint. He was a little surprised at the glare in Alucard’s eyes when he looked up though, but couldn’t help the wry smirk that tugged at his lips when the dhampir nearly growled at him as he slid down his body and pinned his hips with his forearms. Thankfully, the sound was immediately drowned out by a distant rumble of thunder.

“Have you ever had anyone suck you?”

Alucard stared down at him with a mixture of apprehension and anticipation. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“Hn. Hold on to something then.”

“Trevor!” The dhampir admonished with a hoarse sound not unlike that of a stage-whisper. “Stop this. You will wake Sypha!”

Trevor laughed, low and into the back of his throat. “You mean _you_ will wake Sypha. I know how to keep my mouth busy; so, you better shut yourself up.”

Alucard meant to pull back and roll away. He really did. This was indecent! He meant to scold Trevor much more harshly than this. Maybe even leverage his superior strength or speed to unmoor him and throw him off. He really did mean to put an immediate stop to everything that was transpiring.

Didn’t he?

And then he was inside Trevor’s mouth. Hot. Wet. Tight around him. Sliding upwards to suckle and tease. Pressure and movement that short circuited the dhampir’s thoughts and caused a catch to spring in his chest so violently he nearly convulsed. Alucard knew pain, and many of the depths to which it could descend, but he had never known such pleasure, nor the heights it promised to drag him into. Within moments, he was a man discovering possibilities he’d never before thought himself capable of. He suddenly understood desire and obsession, bad poetry and endless poorly-though-out sonnets, in a way he never had. It was Heaven.

It was Hell.

The dhampir began to rock against the hunter’s hands and mouth in a helpless rhythm: his hips undulating upwards with each hard suck or flick of a practiced tongue. Every fiber of Alucard’s being wanted nothing more than to cry out his ecstasy. To dig his fingers into that mess of unkempt brown hair until he was weak with release. Vaguely, he worried about accidentally choking Trevor but the hunter had such command of the situation, such control over his otherwise undisciplined movements, that it quickly became clear he needn’t bother with such concerns. In fact, it was already clear to Alucard that he was at Trevor’s mercy…completely…and in the worst way.

He couldn’t last. The dhampir’s breathing was crashing into itself in a desperate bid for air. He was stuttering, whimpering, panting with an urgency he couldn’t communicate. He felt as if he were breaking apart; splitting into jagged pieces through the fractures in his soul, his entire body on fire as he fell from a great height and into the abyss. He tried to grab onto Trevor’s shoulders, fighting against the Belmont’s hold on his thighs in one final attempt to slow his fall. But then, he burst.

Light. Joy. Blessed euphoria.

He was coming. Pulse after reckless pulse of all of his pent-up desire into Trevor’s welcoming mouth. Alucard lost every sense of himself. He might have screamed, he wasn’t sure. Called out to gods he’d never bothered to pray to before, begging for solace and further punishment all at the same time. Felt his flesh and his spirit weep with rapture and then descend into delirium. It was like the feeling of drawing on living blood, but instead of taking, this time, he was the one giving. Everything. Every last drop of his soul in endless waves of orgasmic bliss to another who drank it from him without hesitation. Nothing was as it should be, everything was in chaos, but the dream was too much to give up and he was taken down into its depths until only nothingness remained.

Trevor simply smiled, despite himself; releasing his hold on the dhampir and laying a tender kiss to the inside of his thigh. He knew Alucard didn’t feel it, however. He was already unconscious.

All around them the storm raged, unabated.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“So, was I right?” Sypha asked conversationally, delicately sipping her passable morning coffee.

The sounds of the tavern were little more than a din in the background but it was enough to cause Trevor Belmont the kind of discomfort that already had him squinting into his breakfast.

“What?” Came the reply, as he continued to blearily dig through a plate of eggs and beans. Trevor, as Sypha had long ago learned, was not a morning person and last night had sadly not improved that trait. “Oh, yeah. Turns out you were.”

She made a triumphant noise. “Hmph. See? I told you Adrian was untouched and you didn’t believe me.”

“Yeah, yeah. You win.” 

Sypha squirmed happily in her chair, glancing about to ensure that Alucard had not yet returned from his bath to overhear them. He’d opted not to join them right away after waking. Though, considering all that had happened the night before, Sypha did not find that especially surprising. In fact, the normally aloof dhampir had barely even been able to look either of them in the eye before vanishing into the back rooms of the inn for a well-earned scrub. Neither of them had seen him since.

Trevor sighed and flicked a bit of something unidentifiable off of his fork. “Thing is, I really don’t see what you’re getting at with all this, Sypha. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that was fun but…”

The Speaker huffed indignantly. “You know,” She interrupted. “For someone who’s family is so renowned for their learning and knowledge of the supernatural, you really don’t seem to catch on to the obvious sometimes.”

Trevor scowled but regained his pointed look. “Oh? How’s that?”

She nearly glowered back at him. “Vampires, for the most part, were once human, yes? And, as humans, they feel, they want, they…well, all kinds of things! The stories alone prove that! My point here, Trevor, is that one day, Alucard is going to get old and jaded and become just like all those other vampires who have no respect for the mortals around them. No respect for intimacy or connection or any of the things great about humanity. Who can’t make love because they can’t truly share in the heart and soul of another person. Only body. But we are at the beginning! Don’t you see?! Alucard has the chance to become something better. To have a better story! Before he’s…abused. Heartbroken and betrayed. Before he becomes just like every other creature around here who only sees the bad in people because people only show them the bad. He can be shown love instead. He can be a part of the beauty of it and to remember what it was like. We can be that for him.”

Trevor contemplated her words. Or, at least, he appeared to contemplate them through another mouthful of eggs and ale. Seriously, it wasn’t even mid-morning and he was already half-way into his second mug of pub-swill millet mash.

“Hrmph.” He finally added. “Sounds like you’re on a dangerous experiment.”

“It’s about a longer view, Trev. How many times have you seen such a creature and thought, ‘if only I had known them years ago, centuries ago even, I could have changed things!?’”

“Uh…. never.”

Sypha sighed and rolled her eyes but casually sipped her coffee again for several minutes. At which point, Trevor finally seemed to come to some manner of conclusion on the subject.

“Alright, Madam Director, I’ll play along.” He chuckled, if a bit sarcastically. “What’s next on the plan? Though, preferably it should involve some return favors this time, yeah?”

All he got, for the time being, was a wan and mysterious smile.


	2. The First Act

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Well, this is already a story in the process of taking shape. So, I'm all in! Enjoy! Comments and thoughts always welcome below. - Nas)

**The First Act**

Alucard had been away for a rather long time. He didn’t reappear following Trevor’s second round of eggs and ale nor did he emerge from the bath house as they contemplated their next steps.

Sypha leaned back in the rickety tavern chair and huffed thoughtfully.

“While I’m pleased to know that I was correct, and I knew I would be!” She went on; admonishing finger raised to highlight her point. “I think you were right in taking the lead on this, Trev. I have to admit that I don’t have as much experience with…well…some of the more precarious elements of this.”

“You mean once _I’ve_ got him under control…”

Sypha actually swatted him. He wasn’t wrong, of course, but he really didn’t have to put it like that. She’d only meant that being intimately inexperienced likely entailed a possibility that Alucard would not have particularly good control over his vampiric instincts when placed in a…compromising position. She had already predicted, for example, that this might be a sore spot for the dhampir because, for all either of them knew, he would, as they say, bite. And she had far less talent in anticipating and managing such things than Trevor did. 

She sighed, swirling the dregs of her coffee pensively. When she’d come up with the idea of sensually approaching the dhampir over a week ago, it had gone so much better in her imagination. The scenario she had built up had been sweet, almost charming, in a sentimental sense. Involving all kinds of slow explorations and pleasurable discoveries on all their parts. But now, she hated how it was coming off as borderline tawdry in conversation.

“I’ve seen how people treat him.” She finally stated, more in continuation of her own thoughts on the larger matter than off the topic at hand. “Those looks, those comments, shunning and refusing to speak with him or even acknowledge him. Sneering like he’s some kind of…leper.”

“Yeah, kinda how they treat all of us.”

“That’s exactly my point!” Sypha exclaimed, before gasping at her own outburst and dropping her voice again. “Trev, don’t you see? Everyone around here is so terrified that Alucard is going to become the next Dracula Țepeș, they haven’t stopped to notice that they’re the ones turning him into it? But not like the Belmont name has helped either, I suppose. You can hardly look at another person without horrid suspicion or them at you! I’m starting to wonder if the two of you are on opposite ends of a spectrum that just turns out the same no matter which end you’re on.”

Trevor smirked but his response was direct. “And you’ve decided to “save” us then, is that it?”

Sypha scowled. “I’m not here to give you absolution, so stuff it with the snide remarks. What I mean is that Alucard may not ever trust another human being again in his life because he won’t have had any reason to. You might not ever take a chance on someone like him because “they’re all just monsters anyway” and around and around we go! Am I the only one here who gets it?”

Trevor sighed and thumbed idly at a sliver of wood peeling up from the edge of the table.

“I get it, Syph.” He replied. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Or maybe I’m just not the right person to do it. You’ve said it yourself, I’m not exactly the most overtly affectionate guy in the world and Alucard strikes me as, I dunno, more of the sappy type. Kinda like you.”

“Well,” She decided to ignore his last remark for the moment. “Good thing you’re bisexual, at least.”

“What? I’m not bisexual.”

She stared hard at him across the table. “Um…. what? Trev…if you…”

But Trevor only laughed; taking the moment to poke a little fun at Sypha’s serious demeanor and even more serious pout. “Nah. It’s fine. It’s just that I like to think of myself more as…utilitarian. You know? Whatever works.”

She could have hit him, but they were drawing too much attention as it was.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_“It lies not in our power to love or hate,  
For will in us is overruled by fate.  
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,  
We wish that one should love, the other win;  
And one especially do we affect  
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:  
The reason no man knows; let it suffice  
What we behold is censured by our eyes.  
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:  
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”_

They were the lines of one of his mother’s favorite poems. A poem she had read to him over and over when he was young, before telling him once again how she had first met his father, how they had fallen in love, and how he had been the beautiful result of it. Now, as Alucard sat in silence on the bath house floor, still fully dressed, he found himself repeating the familiar refrain in a somewhat different light. 

Love was something he held in high regard; perhaps idolized even. But that was due in part to the fact that he believed it was something he would never possess and, truthfully, didn’t deserve to. No, no one would love him. Not like that. They would fear him, maybe even desire him, but the hallowed divinity of real passion would always be out of his reach. That was simply the way of things. The order of the cosmos. Fate. 

_“It lies not in our power to love or hate.”_

The steam had slowly begun to seep into his skin; warming him where he was normally cool and passive. Whenever he took in deep breaths to sate his want for air, he could feel the heat and the moisture tickling at his chest and calming his anxious heart.

He though back again to the night before. 

He had never known that something as simple as skin to skin touch could be so powerful. That it could rattle him so completely as to leave him helplessly panting and wanton in another man’s arms. And not just any man! Trevor fucking Belmont.

But the experience of it still had him shaken and his mind attempting to work through what had happened from any angle he could parse. How it had felt. The desperation. The need. How there had been layers to his touch. Alucard had, at first, detected only heat beneath his hands; the kind of deep, radiating, incandescence of life generated by all humans at their very core. From there, it became a vibration; an energy thrumming outward and into his palm. Then, the smoothness of skin. Trevor’s arm, his wrist, and finally, his shoulders. He’d longed to touch him more but he hadn’t had the wherewithal at the time to take it further. 

Beneath the hunter’s skin, the dhampir could then feel what underlay such superficial presentations. Strong, firm, musculature; moving in time with the man’s fingers, and then his mouth. Past even that and on to the soothing rhythm of his heartbeat deep at his center; the reassuring cadence and meter of a living body pressed against his without the stutter or palpitation of fear. Oh, how that alone had intoxicated Alucard’s senses. And then, there was something beyond even that. An essence, a soul perhaps, that quivered in the spaces just beyond his perception. How he had desperately wanted to touch that too but he didn’t know how. Not that he’d been given the chance to even contemplate it, since only seconds later he had completely lost himself to the madness of release.

Honestly, Alucard wasn’t sure if he should be embarrassed about that fact or not. Trevor hadn’t seemed perturbed by his frenzy. Sypha hadn’t looked at him strangely after they’d awoken this morning, as he half expected she might, given that he was almost certain he’d cried out as a result of Trevor’s…ministrations. 

_“For will in us is overruled by fate._  
_When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,_  
_We wish that one should love, the other win.”_

Or maybe he was just really overthinking it. For all he knew, he could walk back out into the tavern right now only to discover that Trevor considered him to be little more than a masturbatory play-thing and Sypha was none the wiser. Hadn’t Trevor even said something to that effect? That he was feeling the weight of unmet needs and that the dhampir was…well…there? But damn him to Hell if he didn’t still want to do it again! He was already fantasizing about the feel of the hunter’s mouth and what other things might feel like as well.

Alucard sighed and glanced up at the only window adorning the bath house door. The sun was well and truly up, which meant that his two companions had likely finished their breakfasts and would be wondering after him soon. They were supposed to be leaving for Nicăieri today; a town about three days walk from where they were and just inside the foothills of the Carpathians. A dangerous place with an even more dangerous reputation.

They’d received word of unusual activity in and about the town’s old Plague-era catacombs; of the variety that sadly implied something more than just a typical hellspawn infestation. Some of what they’d heard even had Alucard a little more on edge than usual. Stories of strange and unexpected weather events, of red and white lines of light appearing and disappearing in the ground, of water that flowed upwards, of a voice on the wind that spoke terrifying words that no one could understand. He’d told Trevor and Sypha that he suspected unholy ritual and possible cult worship. What he hadn’t told them was that he did not believe it to be demonic. In his estimation, these reports could mean something far worse.

Dracula’s court had, at one point or another, seen just about every vampire noble in the known world and Alucard could distinctly remember all of them. Each unique, in their own terrifying ways, but each paying their respects in the polite fashion of noblesse oblige. Vampires were, if nothing else, decorous in their own company, and every one of them adhered, without fail, to the civil customs indicative of the social elite. But this parade of privilege didn’t include every vampire there was. In fact, his father had often warned him of Those Outside. They were the Elder Ones; more primordial forces of Nature than earthly beings or even Undead. Most of them, he had claimed, didn’t even remember their former lives any longer and existed now as Incarna of the land. Ensconced in woodlands and summits to draw their power from the living ground rather than the people upon it.

His father’s power, and that of the castle, had long subdued them, however. Kept them quiet and asleep in the crevices and river bluffs of the mountains and fields. In fact, there had not been evidence of an Elder One in living memory, though their ruins and shrines could still sometimes be seen in the more rural parts of the Wallachian countryside. But everything they had been hearing in the past few days was just exactly like what his father had warned him about since childhood. And with Castlevania continuously on the move in service to Dracula’s genocidal insanity, there was every reason to believe that some of the Eldest could now be awakening somewhere out there in the hinterlands. A fact that could not bode well for anyone. The castle library had even once held a Geography of Outsiders; entitled The Red Book of the Mormânt, for precisely this possibility. It was a massive, red leather, tome that contained a map locating each of them by name and region along with a description of their known predilections. What he wouldn’t have given to have access to it now.

The steam and mist parted; shifting and waning as a form moved through spaces it was unaccustomed to.

It was then that Alucard became, once again, aware that he was not alone in the room. He could hear another person’s breathing and was cognizant of the pair of soiled, leather, boots just a few feet away from him, tapping impatiently. Slowly, with more than a little trepidation, he pried himself free of his thoughts and looked up.

Trevor.

Because of course it was.

“Hey. You coming or what?”

Always the gentleman.

Alucard couldn’t help but glare at him, turning a black look up from the floor where he still sat with his back to a high wooden tub basin. “Is it time to leave?”

“Pretty much. Unless you’re still pissed at me about last night.”

Now the dhampir’s aggravation turned to anger. “And why would you think that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hiding in the bath all morning is a big hint.”

“I don’t _believe_ you!” He hissed. “After what you did…”

“Yeah. Did you hate it?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Did you hate it?”

Alucard sputtered indignantly, the twist of emotions that had been strangling him all morning finally beginning to break loose.

“You could have been hurt!”

Trevor Belmont cocked an eyebrow. That was an interesting thing for Alucard to angrily blurt out just as he was about to lay into him with his ire. Shouldn’t he be talking about how he had been violated? If he was mad about their little romp, shouldn’t he be demanding apologies from the culprit?

“What if I hadn’t been able to restrain myself? What if I had attacked you?! Imagine Sypha waking up to a bloodbath in the bed next to her! You had no sense! You should know better! A Belmont no less! My kind are dangerous when provoked and you had no way of knowing…if…if…”

“How about you just answer the question.”

Of all the insolent, blasé, arrogant, impertinent things to say…If Alucard hadn’t already had years of training in manners and etiquette, he’d be apoplectic by now: his fury inevitably turning his eyes red and his teeth to gnashing razors. Instead, he quieted; livid and seething. He also knew he was blushing but hoped that Trevor would mistake it for a flush of rage rather than the ruddiness of arousal the dhampir already knew it to be. Trying not to lose his comportment again, he kept his eyes fixed ahead of him at a pinpoint of focus on a spigot in the shape of a dragon’s head, rather than continue to further appraise the lithe body that tempted him into unbecoming thoughts.

Carefully, as if approaching a trapped beast, Trevor took two steps forward and then slowly squatted down onto his haunches. Resting his elbows on his knees, he balanced easily enough to be at the same level as Alucard’s gaze. When the dhampir didn’t respond, the attentive hunter raised one relaxed hand until he could grasp the other’s chin and tilt his head up to look at him. Alucard half expected Trevor to ask his question again, such was the insufferable expression of self-satisfaction on his face. But what he actually said was:

“So, wanna do it again?”

Of course, the correct and proper answer would be ‘no.’ That’s what a well-born aristocrat would say, anyway. Or, at least, one that had any kind of sound judgement or proper sense of self-preservation. Pity they were lacking such a person right now.

With a dark and ominous tone, Alucard replied. “If I say yes, are you going to assault me in the middle of the night like you did before?”

“Mmm…no.” The hunter smiled at him with an unnervingly pleasant chuckle. “I’ll give you fair warning next time. And, who knows, I might even let you get a little frisky with those teeth.”

The dhampir swallowed hard. This was not a chance he’d been expecting to take but the proposal was so candid, so unambiguous in Trevor’s characteristic fashion, he was having a hard time refusing. Even though he knew he should.

“If you straight-up bite me, though, I’ll break your neck.”

“So noted.” Alucard tried to keep his voice neutral but just this small measure of nearness to the other man was already making him tremble slightly. He keenly felt the stirrings of hunger in his gut but was unsure as to whether it was for blood or for…something else. He cursed himself for a pathetic, besotted, fool. This wasn’t going to end well, he just knew it.

“But if I may ask…” Alucard continued. “Why?”

“Why what?” Trevor was still holding him by the chin, the pad of his thumb pressed to the divot just beneath his lower lip.

“Why are you offering me this?”

“You really want to know the answer to that or are you worried that I’m just using you to jerk off?”

What a way with words these Belmonts had.

Alucard took a slow breath and stared back at the hunter with bitter resolve. “I want to know why.”

“Ok.” 

With a thud, Trevor dropped onto his knees, leaned forward, and slid the hand holding Alucard’s chin up along the side of his face, towards the back of his neck, until he could manage a good handful of soft, platinum, hair just below his right ear. With a sure grip, he pulled the dhampir up to ghost his lips over the surprised ones that parted below him in a not-quite kiss that had Alucard immediately on edge.

With a completely unexpected amount of tenderness and gentility, the hunter then teasingly brushed his mouth, and then the tip of his tongue, over Alucard’s lower lip, eliciting a soft growl from the dhampir before he finally – finally – closed the distance between them into a deep and demanding kiss. In short order, Trevor began to ravish the other’s mouth until, with a sense of triumph, he heard a faint whimper in Alucard’s breathing. With a twinge of happiness, he also noticed one of the dhampir’s hands just sort of hanging in the air between them; his fingers flexing in a way that told him that the other man very much wanted to touch him but did not quite yet dare to.

However, Trevor didn’t tarry over-long and with a few more licks and nips to Alucard’s pliant mouth he pulled away from him. As the other was catching his breath, he leaned forward to stare directly into his eyes and stated flatly: “Because you need it and I want it.”

“I see.” It came out a little breathlessly but Alucard did not seem intent on arguing the issue further.

“Good. Now, we should get going. Sypha is waiting out by the wagon and if we don’t show up soon, she’s going to come looking. I’m guessing you don’t want her walking in here on me molesting you in a bath tub. Fun as that sounds right now.”

“I should think not!” Alucard spat, pushing back from the hunter’s hold and languidly rising to his feet before Trevor got any more ideas about his prone position. Besides, before anything else, he now figured he was going to have to have a talk with his new…what?...lover?...about keeping their “activities” under wraps if this entire companionship endeavor was going to work. He turned as Trevor stood up behind him. “You should learn to be more discreet, Belmont. Such deviancies are frowned upon. This will only upset Sypha.”

“Why it would it upset Sypha?” The hunter replied with a smug smile that Alucard didn’t at all like. Then, with an utterly inappropriate pat to his back side, Trevor sidled up to him. “She’s the one who put me up to it in the first place.”

With that, he turned on his heel and strode out into the day. Alucard, however, was unable to move for several minutes.


	3. The Many Roads to Perdition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Working on weaving my intended narrative. Full steam ahead!....ahem. - Nas)

**The Many Roads to Perdition**

What would his father say of the humans in his company? That such poor creatures as these would simply not know what they were talking about? Abusing the noblest institutions of intellect by trying to peer into the mysteries of existence through the knot-holes they’d managed to secure for themselves as a child secures a hole in the fence for his popgun? Or would he think them interesting; but only to the point that an immortal should temporarily lodge with them and not live among them? In the end, vampire-aristocrats had all sorts of metaphors by which they described their relationships to humanity: as sovereign to subject, noble to peasant, and master to pet but certainly not as friend or comrade. And never as lover. At least, for the most part.

The wagon creaked onwards, beneath a second deluge that had spiraled in off of the plains in the early afternoon. Trevor sat up at the reigns, shuffling the soles of his boots against the toe board with mild aggravation. Sypha, conversely, had ducked beneath the canvas bow cover along with Alucard as soon as the heaviest part of the sleeting began. Chilled, she had done her best to bundle up in an available wool blanket but as the storm continued, she unconsciously shifted further and further towards the dhampir until they were sitting side by side, sharing what little warmth there was to be had on such a fine Wallachian afternoon.

“How’s it going back there?” Trevor called up, tilting his head to glance at the two of them out of the corners of his vision.

“Fine.” Sypha replied from beneath her wilted hood. Though her tone was less than enthusiastic and she was quickly caught by an irritated cough.

“Yeah, sorry. This storm is…I dunno, demented almost. The rain keeps changing direction so I can’t even angle us away from it.”

Alucard sighed. His initial train of thought from the morning bath house still weighed on him and he was becoming more and more convinced that his reading of the broader situation was the correct one. “Tell me something, Sypha. Do the Speakers ever talk of the Elder Ones?”

“Elder Ones?” She queried in return. “Like, ancient vampires you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, sure.” She shrugged, pulling at the edges of her robe with a scowl. “The oral histories of many of the lands traveled by Speaker tribes contain such stories. We don’t call them Elder Ones, though. We call them the Vetus. It’s an old Roman word meaning…stale, I think. Or just old. I can never remember. Why?”

Alucard rolled a small bit of stray candle wax between his fingers as he thought about his answer. “Unending tempests, water that defies natural direction, winds that cannot be avoided even within walls, and aspects of the land that seem to act as though they have a will of their own. This doesn’t ring a bell with your country folktales?”

Sypha nodded solemnly. “I suppose it does in some ways but I’m not sure how agreed-on this kind of knowledge is. History or fiction, I mean. My people only ever really talked about one of the Vetus in any real sense. You’ve probably heard of him. Fiannis of Alba? He was famous a long, long, time ago for attempting to reclaim his mortality after falling in love with a young peasant woman.”

Alucard chuffed, a sound low in his chest that indicated a small measure of amusement. “Yes, that’s the popular romance. Not entirely how it went down but I understand that people are still drawn to the story of an ancient immortal brought to heel by the love of a simple woman. He was a Celt, though, and not exactly as “courtly” as they make him out to be.”

“What?” Sypha rolled her eyes playfully, nudging Alucard in the ribs with her elbow. “You mean that really old vampires aren’t all silk and embroidery and poetic declarations of undying devotion!? Perish the thought!”

The dhampir laughed lightly as Sypha acted out a brief scene of melodramatic fainting; falling into his arms with the back of her hand firmly attached to her forehead.

“I shall never be the same again! Knowing what I know now!” She announced, hints of her sarcasm tugging a smile into the corners of her mouth.

Trevor, having overheard the conversation going on behind him despite the din of the weather, let out a frustrated moan. “Dear God, you don’t think that’s what going on at Nicăieri, do you? I mean, castle hunting, fine. Demonspawn, whatever. But Elders? No one has seen or heard from one of those in, I don’t know, four hundred years at least.”

“I take it the Belmonts have something to say on this matter?” Alucard smiled, despite himself: quite enjoying Sypha’s antics as she remained limply collapsed in his lap and was now toying idly with one of the buttons on his coat.

“Pfff, sure.” Came the response from the driver’s seat. “The first, and as far as I know the only, Belmont to have ever faced one was Leon sometime during the back half of the Crusades. He left an account of the whole ordeal in the Hold.”

“And?” The dhampir prompted. “What did your illustrious ancestor have to say about them?”

Trevor snorted lightly on the word ‘illustrious’ but continued. “Well, he didn’t have anything good to say, I’ll tell you that. The one he ran into was called…uh…Ras-An-Ra, I think. Or maybe it was pronounced Rosh-Anra. Something like that. Anyway, thing was a beast; always shifting in and out of different forms, moving as mist and fog, commanding the elements, that kind of thing. He was pretty clear, though, that there really isn’t much in the way of fighting an Elder One, just putting it the fuck back to sleep.”

Sypha straightened suddenly and grimaced. “Adrian, do you think that this has something to do with Dracula’s and the other vampire’s distractions? I mean, now that they’ve all gone on this whole destroy everything and the human race bent, it’s caught the Elders’ attention?”

“Their attention?” He replied. “No, not as such. Elder Ones don’t really have much in the way of discernment. But I think, in my father’s inattention, they have found their chains loosened and, if I am right…though I hope that I am not…there is one in Nicăieri that has begun to pull at its bonds and is starting to see how far the earthly leash extends.”

“Oh, bloody hell.” Trevor groaned.

“Yes, precisely.” Sypha agreed.

Their amiable camaraderie had returned and Alucard found himself finally beginning to relax again. The warmth of Sypha’s hand, where it still rested on the top of his thigh, was such a welcome moment of casual connection that the dhampir brought his own palm up to rest overtop of hers. When Sypha then threaded her fingers through his and squeezed he couldn’t help but dip his head slightly and smile.

The rain shifted again and began to pelt the rain-fly even harder, forcing Trevor to lean back in the seat so as not end up completely drenched by an out-pouring from the divots in the canvas.

“So, I’m guessing this means that we have _this_ to look forward to the whole way there?” The hunter asked, waving one hand in the general direction of the sky.

“Unfortunately, yes.” Alucard answered. “If this is the will of an Elder One, the wilds will reflect its disturbed state.”

“Ugh, fine.” Trevor grumbled. “Because I was actually beginning to think I should pull us off somewhere to wait until the worst of it passed by. Or maybe find a tavern and stable in a nearby village. Dry off the horse for a little while if nothing else. Or even just my shirt.”

“I think we should anyway.” Sypha said. “We might have to do this bit by bit. Wouldn’t hurt to get a hot dinner and come up with a plan. Or, as much of a plan as we ever have. Adrian? Do you think this Elder One might even be able to say something about your father’s plans or maybe just where the castle is…or…will be?”

“Perhaps, but I am not inclined to try to interrogate such a being if I don’t have to.”

Thoughtfully, Alucard began to gently massage her hand. He had little in the way of body heat to offer her, and he could tell that Sypha was feeling the cold much more than he was, but it was something. Trevor must have been feeling it as well, because the dhampir could still detect the subtle shivers moving across his shoulders with each gust of wind, despite the fact that the Belmont was trying to hide it with a brave and resolute face. Elder Ones were always especially dangerous for precisely this reason: getting to them was often worse than encountering them and their control over the landscape usually meant that anyone foolish enough to hunt them would arrive weakened by cold, sickness, and exposure. If they arrived at all.

“There should be a crossroads up ahead.” Alucard spoke up enough for Trevor to hear him over his sputtering, having been doused by another turn in the rain. “Take the left path. It should bring us to Sărmașu. It’s small and out of the way, but if I recall, there’s a trader’s inn there. They’re used to the strange and unusual wandering in off the road and it’s probably one of the last havens before the foothills.”

Trevor raised his hand in acknowledgement and kicked the horse up to a steady trot; or, just as much as the increasing mud would allow. He was getting worried. They might have to abandon the wagon for a while if things got much worse. The roads in the back country would soon be impassible if the storm didn’t relent and the danger of getting the wagon irretrievably stuck was growing by the minute.

Suddenly, Sypha tensed. “Do you hear that?”

Alucard tilted his head, turning his more acute hearing into the direction of the wind still ruthlessly picking at the thick canopy.

Sounds like words, wind-breath like speaking, but not the same as a person. These words weren’t breathed from a living throat but rather exhaled by the ground in a prologue that belied a perilous new beginning. Alucard could make out the syllables but he didn’t understand them. This language, whatever it was, was not one he was familiar with nor one that he thought might even be native to any Eastern European lands.

“Rā nōfer uben em īkar…netetjen ēēu…reyshut it mut…”

“Do you know what it’s saying?” Sypha pressed, growing more concerned the longer Alucard remained silent.

“No.” He finally replied, unconsciously reaching up to steady her by her arm when the wagon made a hard leeward turn. “I don’t recognize the phonetics. It sounds almost a little like some of the Roma dialects I heard years ago but the words aren’t the same. I don’t know what this is.”

“Best to get out of it then.” Trevor said, cracking the whip overhead and spurring their beleaguered horse onward. “I’m not really in the mood to find out what it’s talking about right now. And we’re still miles from shelter.”

Unsure and more than a little disquieted, both Sypha and Alucard agreed.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It took the better part of three and half hours to cover the distance between the Farthing Crossroads and the village of Sărmașu. The latter was, all in all, a quaint sort of rural outpost with a central lane bisecting two halves of a hamlet that quite adequately represented the somewhat two-faced nature of its populace. On the one hand, the far side of the village was clearly geared towards agriculture; with cottages dotting the hillsides in amongst fields of millet, winter wheat, and sorghum. The near side, on the other hand, was obviously trade-based and boasted a large merchant’s plaza, an exchange office, and an inn. This last point being a most welcome sight to three wind-torn travelers and one very miserable horse.

Taking the lead, Trevor Belmont stepped up as the face of the group; quickly arranging stabling for the wagon and negotiating at the tavern counter for three meals, a room, some light laundry, and, of course, an immediate mug of ale to start the evening off with.

Keeping to the back of the main dining room with Alucard, Sypha sighed good-naturedly; happy to be under a sturdier roof if nothing else. “Well, at least he made it through the first part before starting to chisel his senses off.”

Alucard perked at the analogy and regarded the woman next to him with a look of friendly concern. 

“Sypha? May I ask you something?”

She shrugged. “Of course.”

“I’m…not sure how to approach this but…when did your relationship with Trevor become…?”

“Close?” She smiled at him wryly.

He nodded.

“Hmph.” She replied, tapping her index finger on her lips as she considered the best response. “Six weeks ago? Maybe a little more? It was an ill-considered sort of thing at the beginning, you know. You had decided to remain outside with the wagon one night while we were stopping off in a little town and Trevor and I were talking and then one thing and then another. But it worked out well in the end and Trevor’s actually…quite considerate. Under all that cynicism and doubt is a man who really does care, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes.”

Noting Alucard’s pensive frown she continued. “I… suppose ‘considerate’ isn’t the word you’d use though, is it? Oh, Adrian, this is my fault!”

He looked up at her with a raised eyebrow but didn’t interrupt.

“It was my idea for him to come to you first. But he thought…well…he thought that, given your background, what with the way vampires are and Dracula and all that, there would be a fair amount of danger and vulgarity in this sort of thing that would have to be unlearned first. That being so close to a mortal would result in…instincts… that you might have already ingrained predilections for certain things and that…” She tripped over the words, trying to find something that would fit her meaning.

“…I might harm you.” He finished.

She looked crestfallen. “I should have just asked you about it first. I’m sorry. I don’t think either of us were really sure how this would work and so Trevor came at it with a little too much presumptive practicality, I think. Are you hurt?”

Alucard regarded her thoughtfully. This was all still so completely new to him; he wasn’t entirely sure how to navigate the next steps but he could feel that her remorse was genuine, if somewhat misplaced. Fidgeting, as she was, with a hangnail and chewing on her lower lip.

“He didn’t hurt me.” The dhampir replied with a sigh, glancing back towards Trevor, who was now quite deeply engaged in an argument with the bartender as to what constituted “good” alcohol and why such criteria were especially important to the matters at hand. “Just…caught me off-guard. He obviously thought more of my possible previous experiences than I have. Not unusual for a Belmont, though.”

Catching on to Alucard’s underlying tone of ridicule, Sypha tugged at his arm. “Encountered a lot of Belmonts then, have you?”

He answered with calm smile. “Only down-wind.”

Sypha couldn’t help the small giggle that escaped. “Well, I’ll make sure he takes a bath, then. Wouldn’t do to insult _everyone’s_ sensibilities.”

“I take it this means you are aware of last night, then?”

Sypha tried to fix her features into a more serious and sympathetic expression, but ultimately, failed; returning Alucard’s increasingly affectionate gaze with one of her own. “Kind of hard to miss.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.”

With a huff, said titular Belmont finally rejoined the chuckling pair and with an arc of his refilled clay mug, gestured towards the stairs leading up to the second level. 

“Done and done!” He announced. “Dinner’s in an hour and a half or so and we have all the time we need to get out of these wet clothes. Fire should already be going. And I can tell you that I, for one, am looking forward to not dripping my way into the next life.”

Alucard acquiesced and followed his two companions through the tavern, with all the awkwardly hostile glances from the other patrons that implied, until the three of them reached the furthest room at the end of the top-most hallway. On entering, however, the dhampir almost choked.

It was quite simply the most spectacular display of bad taste he had ever seen. A large elk head hung over a fieldstone fireplace, in front of which was an off-color rug too threadbare to have any sort of identifiable pattern any longer but which, instead, looked more like a tussock of brown moss than actual woven fiber. The floorboards were painted with a dark cherry stain and two high-back chairs sat up against the far wall near a small, round, table that was likely supposed to serve as a breakfast nook but really only came across as the setting for the opening narration to a murder mystery. Both chairs were brocade, with an overly-complicated damask pattern, but their colors were completely mismatched. One was forest green and not altogether completely ugly, while the other was a sort of faded orange like blanched carrots. Furthermore, in the center of the too short table sat a long-degenerated piece of amateur taxidermy. A chipmunk holding a quill pen and sitting on a sheaf of yellowed paper.

To top it all off, there was only a single, albeit gigantic, four-poster bed that was ringed in heavy curtains that were so very obviously once hanging in a rich old woman’s living room and then discarded when they went out of fashion more than thirty years ago. Blue and gold, with white fringed trim turned grey from too long near a sooty hearth. The footboard also contained numerous chipped and dented carvings of what were probably once supposed to be cherubs, with happily smiling faces and fluttering feathered wings. But with years of wear, they now just looked like smooth-skinned gargoyles carrying broken harps. It was all just god-awful hideous.

And Trevor was right at home.

Flopping into one of the chairs nearest the fire he proceeded to peel off his boots, dump out their sandy contents onto the rug, toss them close to the iron grating to warm up and dry, and then start on his outer tunic. Sypha, certainly much more genteel than the hunter even on off days, merely shrugged out of her heavy blue robe and hung it to drain into the corner by the door. The white shift and sandals she typically wore beneath seemed, surprisingly, intact and only mildly damp considering their ordeal. Her hair, unfortunately, was a wet mess of reddish and copper curls tangled around her ears and plastered in ringlets to her forehead. With a delighted grin, she beckoned Alucard forward. 

It was like being welcomed into Ivan the Terrible’s sewing room.

In any case, with a few tentative steps, he did as requested; taking quick notice of the subtle shifts in the atmosphere around them. When Sypha’s delicate fingers came up to grasp the collar of his coat, he watched as the tension in her arms condensed and released. When she stopped there, he canted his head to meet her eyes.

“May I?”

With a slow acknowledgment and a dip of his chin, he consented. 

With unnecessary care and caution, she pulled the coat up and away from the dhampir’s shoulders and let it drop from his torso; rolling it up on her arm before casting it aside onto a nearby peg-board. His linen shirt was sodden beneath it but before taking the gentle affection further, she rested her fingers onto his exposed collar bone.

Where her fingertips lay, Alucard could feel a tingling his skin.

But he could not settle all his doubtful questions; all he knew was that the brute nature of his kind was sure to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds. From Sypha’s physical nearness and hesitation to Trevor’s now intent observation of the both of them from his chair near the fire. In Alucard’s experience, it was the most human side of humanity to treat the more brutal side of the same nature with the fear and revulsion one reserved for the bestial. Tame it or crush it. Did not every town crier bring fresh news of women and children ravaged and murdered by the undead? Of royals and priests who were killers of infants, of maps girdled by empire and boundaries razed along with the buildings and livelihoods that relied on them? Did not the civilized world look down on the suffering of each of them with a righteous _Amen_? Was such scorn not unjustified?

But here, in the quiet, it suddenly no longer seemed to matter. The fire in the hearth was now burning in his chest along with the earnest eyes of a lovely young woman subduing him with little more than a caress to the side of his neck. His own eyes drifted shut as he turned into the proffered warmth.

“Adrian?” Her voice was soft, almost distant in his mind. “Can I kiss you?”

He did not bother to answer her verbally but rather, sought and found her embrace in the darkness.


	4. A Romance of Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (I think I'm getting my sense of things now. But by all means, please enjoy. I'm in the swing of updating weekly now, and I'll keep to that as much as is possible. - Nas)

**A Romance of Resistance**

The kiss was soft, sweet, almost indulgent. Delicate confectionaries; her lips sliding against his with a contented sigh. Gentle pressure turned up to him, encouraging the dhampir to open his mouth for further questioning.

But it made him unsure. He didn’t want her to pull away from him, of course, but nor did Alucard completely understand how to respond to the hands tracing the rise of his chest or the wiry form pressing into him from below. Surely there was no loftier illustration of faith than what she was doing now. A faith that believed that, vampire or not, here was a soul clad in flesh; that tender parents had nurtured it, that it had survived all manner of mysteries and myriad exposures to arrive now in a stature of relative maturity. That he was more than an Idea, entrusted to Nature to build him a suitable shape to fit in, but rather something, someone, to whom ardor and admiration could be addressed. She boldly deepened the kiss and felt him go rigid beneath her touch.

Heat flashed through him and Alucard abruptly turned his head away as his fangs bared. He could feel the change in his demeanor as both shame and excitement shuddered through him; the red tinge to his eyes, the tightening of the tendons in his neck, and the accursed teeth threatening to crack his jaw if denied again.

He expected Sypha to back away, either fearful or merely cautious. It would have been the prudent choice anyway; in so seeing the monstrous change that overtook him. But she didn’t and instead, the dhampir quickly detected another presence at his back. Trevor had stolen up behind him and now, without hesitation, took ahold of the hair at the nape of his neck to force his head up; effectively scruffing him as one might an unruly cat.

Alucard couldn’t suppress the growl that came out in response but he chose not to fight the Belmont’s grip for the moment. 

“Think you can get a handle on that?” He queried in a soft, gravelly, voice next to the other’s ear; practiced fingers coming up to the side of Alucard’s face to indicate the dhampir’s vampirically aroused state. 

It took Alucard several seconds, and a number of panting breaths, to respond. 

“I…I don’t know.”

“Well then…” Was that a smile he felt? “Come to me.”

And with just those few words, Trevor assumed the lead and regained control of their situation. Keeping the dhampir’s head tilted, he used his opposite arm to pull Alucard against him; close enough to begin laying open-mouthed kisses on the cool, pale, skin of the other man’s shoulder all the while the dhampir was held prostrate. A second pair of hands then returned to his chest and Alucard thought he might very well crawl right out of his body and leave it helpless to their pleasures then and there.

“Shhh…” It was Trevor’s voice again. “I’m going to see to you, Adrian. But I don’t want you to worry. Sypha’s here. She’ll be with you, with us. But I want you to work this out on me first. I can take it.”

The dhampir arched and snarled. The hunter seemed keen to play him as one might both music and verse. Not with the reverence usually reserved for high art, but the kind that is kept and used; like tapestry or a fine silver absinthe spoon. Poetry was, after all, just as porous as a drip-spoon – the more the better even. To distill the precious spirits that poured through them and into the waiting mouths of eager supplicants. The heat surrounding Alucard felt like that now; infiltrating every pore in his body with the ambrosia of life. The creature within him stirred again.

He felt Trevor laugh before forcefully turning him around and claiming his gasping mouth in a fierce kiss. His was so unlike Sypha’s caress. Fearless and demanding where she had been pliant and welcoming. He tasted of ale and dark spices, and burned hotter, nipping the dhampir’s lips apart until he could recklessly run the tip of his tongue along the backs of sharpened teeth. Flicking the slick appendage against their tips until the barest hint of blood began to color the hunter’s unique flavor with heady notes of buttery grist, muscat wine, and bittersweet almond.

Alucard very nearly lunged into him; instantly maddened by just this tiny sample of the Belmont’s blood. But Trevor held him firmly still, tightening his grasp every time the dhampir moved to either escape him or fight him. By necessity, Trevor then broke the kiss momentarily for air but had to take it in quickly, as Alucard then followed him and dove in to savor his mouth again. It was an almost brutal embrace and Sypha began to wonder if Trevor might have misjudged things yet again.

To her relief, and slight surprise, Alucard then quieted and dropped his head to peck a few small bites along the ridge of the hunter’s jawline. But his shoulders were curved in a predatory posture and the dhampir lingered with each kiss, as if on the brink of completely surrendering to his baser predatory instincts. It was unnerving. She’d never seen the dhampir so…frenzied. Adrian Țepeș was, if nothing else, usually the very picture of gentility, even under decidedly vulgar circumstances. But now, he seemed almost undone: a carefully crafted visage taken apart by all that still lies beneath it.

When Alucard then ran the palms of his hands up and onto Trevor’s chest, he paused breathlessly, still trying to maintain his dignity but picking at the clingy fabric with impatient fingers. “You’re…soaking wet.”

“Uh, yeah.” The hunter chuckled. “That’s what happens when you steer a wagon through a hurricane. Now, why don’t you help me get this off.” He tugged suggestively at the wrinkled collar of his tunic.

Having leave to touch the hunter was one thing, to be the one to undress him was quite another however. But the dhampir took the moment in stride and started with the buttons and ties on Trevor’s surcoat; stripping it away with aplomb before pulling at the hem of his undershirt. Then, suddenly less confident in his ability to expose so much delectable skin without untoward consequence, Alucard hesitated. Trevor took pity on him though, and crossed his arms to wrench the garment over his head and drop it to the floor to be forgotten with the rest of his clothes.

It was as if divine prostration over took him and Alucard reached out with shaking hands to reverently graze his nails over tanned flesh, puckered scars, and the moistened sheen still in evidence of the rain that caressed the hunter’s body. No one had ever been so bold as to bare their chest to him openly and he couldn’t help the fascination of a Belmont doing so now. He wanted to explore more of this map of lines and textures, to run his hands possessively over every dip and curve until it was indelible in his memory. But his companions had other ideas.

“Adrian.” He heard Sypha whisper. “Raise your arms.”

He did so, as his own linen shirt was lifted up and peeled away. The first touch then came, unexpectedly, to his hair as thin, nimble, fingers playfully carded through the tresses at his shoulders while another, larger, hand pulled at the lock just over his temple.

“Not even a single solitary tangle.” He heard Trevor breath into his neck. “It’s like touching corn silk.”

“That’s because _I_ know how to make use of a comb, Belmont.” Alucard shot back in a humorous tone. Trevor could have swatted him, but instead only chuckled in response. He was actually quite pleased that the dhampir still had something of his wits about him and was not completely lost to sensation. At least, not yet.

“Asshole.”

What Alucard was not so much prepared for was the mouth that suddenly descended onto his chest, tracing the large scar that began at his collarbone with lips and tongue that began to move to his sternum, followed by a warm palm that continued the motion across the flat of his abdomen and onto his hip. When Trevor then applied teeth to the sensitive ridge that crossed his right pectoral, the dhampir stiffened and hissed.

“Relax.” He soothed. “If you keep tensing up like that, all you’ll do is make yourself come really fast and then probably pass out. Ease up. Let go. It shouldn’t be so much of a sharp feeling. More like an ache. A deep, wanting, ache you can’t quite relieve.”

The best the other man could do in reply was to nod and seek another kiss, which Trevor gave willingly; once again brazenly teasing the fangs in his mouth with sweeps of an expert tongue. Alucard’s mind was flitting away again, as his impulses warred with his intuition. He couldn’t help but remember the old story of the tender-hearted man who placed a frozen viper against his own bosom, and was bitten when it finally thawed. Such was the danger of taking any cold-blooded being so intimately close to oneself. ‘But better that it should sting us and we die than its chill seep into our hearts,’ his mother had said. ‘But truly warm it, perhaps we never can.’

The dhampir was momentarily shaken loose from his thoughts when powerful hands and an equally powerful body lifted him up with an arm around his midsection and another beneath his thigh; carrying him over to the massive bed, where he was placed onto his back in the center of the down duvet. Not thrown, as he might have expected, but not exactly laid down gently either. He made to sit up, naturally, but Trevor immediately covered him, and with a carnal moan, he felt the hunter entwine their bodies and swallow him with another all-consuming kiss. Alucard had never felt what it was like to have another man lying fully atop him, ravaging his mouth, pinning him down skin against skin until the heat and pressure made him desperate for breath. He didn’t even realize that he had started rutting against Trevor’s hip until the surly hunter slid his hand beneath the waistband of the dhampir’s pants to grip his naked backside and help to guide his movements into a steadier rhythmic meter. 

When the hunter left his mouth for his neck again, it was all Alucard could do not to whine at him for the loss of the coveted touch. Startlingly, the dhampir found that he rather liked kissing, though he knew the peril of allowing Trevor to continue giving him licks of his blood between each one. Too soon, he would be ravenous for a headier, deeper, mouthful and risk the worst of what his nature might demand. Alucard writhed beneath the hunter’s onslaught. He was drowning and awakening, begging for more and yet hesitant to receive it. The scent and heat that surrounded him made him dizzy with need and a quickly rising lust he didn’t know how to sate. He felt as though he might already be on the precipice of orgasm and Alucard stuttered in his movements even as the hunter’s hand continued to instruct him. The flustered moan that came from the dhampir then must have clued Trevor into his dilemma.

“Alright, easy now.” He whispered. “Take a moment to breathe. Let your body loosen up.”

Alucard tried to do as Trevor asked, he really did, but he couldn’t seem to get his limbs to cooperate. It was like a caged animal in his ribs, clawing at him to be set free. When the hunter pulled back from him, he even reached up reflexively to grab ahold of his arms lest he try and leave him bereft there on the bed. Trevor only laughed lightly.

“I’m not going anywhere.” He replied. “I’m just getting you onto your side. I don’t think you’ll want to miss this.”

With such teasingly spoken words, Alucard allowed himself to be rolled onto his right side, facing away from the hunter. With Trevor then along his back, he was free to open his eyes again and see what the Belmont might be referring to. 

Which, as it turned out, would be Sypha.

The young woman had not been idle in the time that her companions had been otherwise engaged. The curtains, hideous as they were, had been drawn completely around the bed save for a small opening at the side where Sypha was now standing, wry smile and hands on her hips. She had also divested herself of the damp shift and stood now in only her small-clothes at precisely the angle where the dhampir’s improved low-light vision might see her best. She was thin and sinewy, but with supple curves that were exceptionally pleasing to the eye. Her entire form, in this way, seemed as equally agile as her hands were; ready at a moment’s notice to weave magic out of the very fabric of existence.

Almost as if working in premeditated concert, Alucard observed as Sypha then began to slowly remove her breast band just as Trevor slipped his hand down again past the offending pants to wrap around the dhampir’s more than eager manhood. He’d been hard since they had begun this ill-advised encounter several minutes ago but now the direct touch was enough to send him reeling.

When Alucard moaned and shuddered, the hand stroking him paused just long enough for him to calm again but not before he heard more words whispered into the back of his shoulder.

“Pay attention.” The hunter directed, tracing the shell of the dhampir’s ear with his tongue. “Don’t get distracted.”

Alucard huffed in response. How was he supposed to concentrate on any of this? He was already losing his mind and believed he would shortly be losing his essence as well, no matter what Trevor said to him in the meantime. The angular, masculine, body at his back, the hard column of the other man’s arousal pressed into his thigh, the hand that tantalizingly caressed him most intimately; clearly gauging the shape, texture, and quality of him and of his excitement, the taste of blood in his mouth not his own, and now, a soft, feminine, shape slowly revealing herself to his gaze with nothing short of absolute confidence. This was already more than even his most secret fantasies had ever provided him with.

Sypha took her time though, which was impressive given the fact that she hardly had a scrap of clothing to remove. The braided band fell away easily, revealing small, pert, breasts already tight with the cold in the room. And then her waist-wrap below the wide flare of her hips, just enough for both men to see the rounded rise at the apex of her thighs and the crisp curls that hid the rest from view. As she climbed onto the bed and then elegantly crawled towards them, Trevor continued to stroke the dhampir; though he had also finally managed to loosen Alucard’s pants enough to slide them down to mid-thigh. 

To the dhampir’s surprise, Sypha’s first action was to assist Trevor in the work of undressing him completely and she swept the clothes from his legs so as to cast them aside at the foot of the bed. Alucard, however, remained transfixed. The hand still moving on him, the hunter having returned to nibbling at the back of his neck, and Sypha reaching up to explore his face, and then his chest, and then on lower over his abdomen. She seemed fascinated by him; the bone-white skin smooth as polished stone, the few branches of blue veins beneath its surface, the slim but well-built counterpoint to Trevor’s larger physique looming behind them. When she then took his hand and pressed it to her own chest, Alucard bucked into the hunter’s grip and groaned.

She lay down to face the both of them, sidling up so that the dhampir would be effectively trapped between hunter and mage. She then also replaced Trevor’s hand with her own and continued to stroke Alucard gently so that the other man could finally wriggle free of his own clothes and discard them thusly. Her touch was so much mellower than the Belmont’s, but was no less pleasurable, which again, the dhampir found to be both confusing and arousing. As a result, however, Alucard actually smiled a little and leaned in to steal a tender kiss from her lips. 

“There now.” The hunter murmured, retaking his place against the dhampir’s back. As he ran his hands over the other’s panting form, Trevor again began to tutor Alucard in the finer points of giving and receiving pleasure.

“Like this.” He instructed, taking Alucard’s hand and showing him how Sypha enjoyed being touched. First from the side of her neck to her shoulder and then from her shoulder down to one soft breast. He showed Alucard how to use his thumb to tease at her nipple and then his nails to scrape tickling lines onto her stomach. All the while, she kept up the careful rhythm on his straining manhood and gave up little sighs and mewls when he did his work correctly.

It was now truly becoming too much and softly, Alucard began to plead with his captors.

“Please.” He moaned. “Please, I can’t take much more.”

“Hmmm.” He felt the vibrations of the sound transfer from Trevor’s body to his own. “You want me to make you come again?” 

How could such a boorish, crude, and churlish man make him so hot he couldn’t think straight? How could he crave the intoxicating alchemical mixture of breath, skin, and touch with such a fervor as to embarrass even his most untrained politesse. This, it would seem, would be his downfall. This would be his vice. Not only lust but intemperance; the combination of which had been the end of every sort of poet and moral philosopher since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The passion that held him in place simply defied all intellectual logics. And truth be told, if in reality the Devil could only ever appear in church by virtue of an attorney, and then make the best statements such that the facts would bear out his arguments, then the influence of right and moral teachers would have been better than it is. As it stood, Alucard could not be made to care whether he was now at the gates of Heaven or beginning the sheer drop to Hell.

“Tell me what you want, Adrian.” Trevor growled into his ear. “Tell me how you want it.”

“I…” He was forced to stop and try again as Sypha released her hold on his erection and began to slide down his body. “I…want…oh…Trevor, please. I…want to feel you. I just want to feel you.”

“Yeah?” The hunter continued to tease. “You want to feel me?”

It was at that moment that Alucard lost all capacity for coherent speech, as Sypha’s solicitous mouth took him in to the root and suckled him with determined purpose. He arched helplessly into Trevor as she did so, close to shouting at the wonder of it all. Nor could he stop the involuntary thrusts that rocked his hips further into her and had him trembling on the edge of release.

It was also at that moment that the hunter behind him took his words in stride, if not completely in meaning, and did something that the dhampir could not have predicted had he lived another thousand years. First, it was the hand that stopped and steadied his hips; which Alucard vaguely assumed was meant to prevent him from accidentally choking the woman taking him into completion. Second, it was something pressing at him from behind. Slickened by some kind of oil, he suddenly felt what he could only imagine to be Trevor’s index finger carefully circling his entrance; as if to wet him. The dhampir gasped at the unfamiliar sensation, but before he could ask the hunter what he planned on doing down there, the sleek digit penetrated him.

It was the last barrier between the dhampir and his orgasm. So strange, yet so sinfully erotic, something deep within Alucard seized and instantly overpowered him. His nails split through the tips of his fingers as he dug into the bedclothes for stability while his fangs nearly cut into his own lower lip from the force of the bite he was unable to keep control of. His body undulated, unsure whether it wanted to curl forward into Sypha’s waiting mouth or bend backwards into Trevor’s dexterous stroking. In and out of him, the hunter seemed to know exactly how to move against the hidden places inside of him that stole his thoughts along with his breath. 

But for Alucard, it was all over. He thrashed once, grabbed onto Trevor’s hip behind him, and screamed. It was nothing like before, as he came in long, agonizing, pulses that spent his seed into the woman now happily swallowing everything he had to give. But nor did Trevor relent; pressing deeper into him in such a way that it made his release feel like it could last forever. The harder the hunter stroked that place inside of him, the harder the next wave of his orgasm would be until the dhampir was sobbing his pleasure into their mutual embrace. He knew he was crying out, was begging his companions to have mercy on him, and then was heaving in the aftermath of one of the most astonishing experiences he’d ever had in his life. Twitches of overstimulation fidgeted down his body as quivering ecstasy flowed through him in throbbing beats not at all in time to his heart. There were simply no words for what he was feeling.

So, when Sypha finally rose up to kiss some of the sweat from his brow and to continue helping him to calm and regain some of his composure, Alucard reached out for her. With gentle affection, she gladly snuggled into his arms to comfort him. But his tranquility was short-lived. Sypha was still touching him and nipping at his mouth to coax him into another hungry kiss. And though Trevor had withdrawn his hand after bringing the dhampir to an explosive end, Alucard could still feel the other man’s hard organ rubbing at his back.

It would seem that his lovers were not yet done with him.


	5. Bloodless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (A chapter in which Trevor says 'fuck' a lot. So much for that high-brow vocabulary I've been working on. - Nas)

**Bloodless**

Trevor Belmont simply adored smooth, pale, skin. His other proclivities had come upon him early in life, of course, but even the most entrenched preferences must change their key now and then, on penalty of monotony or simply getting out of tune. He even supposed it might have to do with a childhood appreciation of complementary colors, in some way. Wherein the prolonged exposure to any one hue on a person’s vision might result in the appearance of the opposing shade: that staring too long at a _red_ object would be a _green_ image. But Alucard’s flawless white countenance had the effect of being complementary only to itself and Trevor quite relished the way he remained exactly as he was whether the hunter had his eyes open or closed. His mind could picture the dhampir in no other way than this one.

How absolutely exquisite he was. Seemingly fragile yet invulnerable, in the way that all vampires the Belmonts had known tended to be. And they had known many. The Hold was filled with their accounts (and in some cases, their corpses); of tales and memoirs about encountering the ravenous undead from the highest mountain redoubts in Siberia to the furthest ports of Asia. Some such stories were clear that it was merely monsters his ancestors were hunting; creatures who killed and destroyed everything in their path despite the beauty of appearing as noble wolves, bats, or in one famous description, clouds of butterflies. Others were more complicated and acknowledged the moral ambiguity of those who had once been human but were now forced to feed on their living kin in order to sustain themselves, or die, or become horrors, if they tried to abstain. But none admitted to intercourse with one. None dared even encroach on the territory of laying with a vampire, willingly or otherwise, even if the implications that such a thing had happened before were plain enough in what went unsaid between the cursive lines.

Trevor could have laughed; at himself, at the situation, at all of it. What his ancestors, his parents, would say about him now. The irony of the last scion of the Belmont dynasty laying naked with the same such heir-apparent of the most brutal regime vampire-kind had ever inflicted onto the world: Dracula. But the covetous desire in his heart was already rooted and it worried him. Sypha’s plan had been to welcome Alucard into their intimate company as a way to care for and unburden him; to assuage his pain and loneliness and to gentle him for the endless years to come. Balm, in Gilead. Now, with the dhampir’s slick back pressed against him, shivering in the wake of orgasm, what he wanted to do to him was anything but consoling. He wanted to subdue him, to take him, and to triumph in his submission.

Sypha remained curled up in Alucard’s embrace, lacing his throat with soft nibbles before plying his mouth with needier intent. Trevor was pleased to see the dhampir respond appropriately, passionately returning her affection with deep but disciplined kisses. But there remained the question of her safety still, and Trevor was not yet convinced that Alucard had enough control over his impulses to allow him any measure of free reign with the waifish mage. His instincts to feed, to consume, could injure, or even kill her, in the flash of a single inattentive second. When she then finally pulled back to regain her bearings, the hunter took his opportunity.

Alucard abruptly found himself pushed forward until he was made to lie face-down in the center of the mattress; Trevor’s weight settling fully along his back. It was a rather unguarded position and he froze, half expecting the hunter to attempt to pin him completely or possibly even tie him to the bed posts. When, instead, he felt wide sweeps of a warm palm down the length of his body, he mumbled his way through an appreciative moan before turning his head in an attempt to regard the other man.

“Do you know what you do to me?” Trevor murmured.

The dhampir shuddered at the hot words whispered into the tip of his slightly pointed ear.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

Alucard was not ignorant as to how men coupled. Vampires, especially the courtly ones, had no specific compunctions about gender when it came to their pleasurable pursuits, and he had, on more than one occasion, witnessed performances of seduction between members of the same sex. He had not, however, been privy to the acts themselves and had nothing to draw on in response to the body restraining him. 

Nervously, he hid his face in the coverlet but his words came across as anything but timid.

“You intend to fuck me.”

Trevor raised an eyebrow, unseen given his position. Alucard was not often in the habit of using direct profanity unless it suited his mood. And that mood was typically one of discontent.

With a wry smile, the hunter began to mouth kisses into the pale expanse of the dhampir’s shoulder, noting the slight hitch in the other’s breathing as he did so. Alucard might have only just been satisfied but the unprompted way in which he flexed his lower back and subtly opened his thighs for better friction against the bed told Trevor that he was not yet completely sated. Moreover, it was a testament to just how quickly vampires could stoke their lusts. Either way, the hunter secretly thanked whatever divine intelligence had seen fit to make the halfling receptive to him; seeing as he had every intention of defiling his vestal sanctity.

From her seated position less than a foot away, Sypha however, eyed Trevor suspiciously. She was well versed in his coarser manners and blunt approaches but she wasn’t precisely sure what it was he was playing at here. Before she should say anything though, Trevor was quick to raise up and reassure her with a vehement kiss and then a motion for her to lie back down next to the prone dhampir. As she did so, he brought his lips back down to Alucard’s ear.

“Yes. I’m going to fuck you.”

He punctuated the fricative by sliding his hand down onto the dhampir’s backside and pressing his thumb into one of the dimples in the muscle just above. When Alucard sighed but remained still he moved again to tease at his cleft with some of the oil he’d already left there.

“I told you I’d give you fair warning, Adrian.” Trevor stated, by way of a sharp nip into the dhampir’s shoulder. “This is it. And it’s all you’ll get.”

The hunter narrowed his eyes skeptically when Alucard responded to his exhortation with a benign huff. 

“Is that a ‘yes?’”

“It’s not a ‘no.’” The dhampir parlayed back. 

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a…” Alucard suddenly caught on his words as a single sure finger unexpectedly slid into him once again. He shifted uncertainly as Trevor then began to tease him with rather dexterous ease but finally took a breath in order to proceed. “It’s a ‘until I put a stop to you.’”

The hunter chuckled at his low, sinister, tone. “Is that a threat?”

“It might be. I’m stronger and faster than you are, Belmont. Provoke me and there’s no telling what I could do.”

“Ah, yes.” Trevor replied, sinking a second finger into the dhampir’s body as he nipped again at the smooth skin of his back. “There’s the rub, though. You see, I’m pretty sure Sypha has her heart set on something sweet and romantic from you. Good on her, too. I’m pretty much rubbish at that sort of thing so it works out both ways. But until I’m completely confident in your mastery of the kind of whims you lot are known for; I’m not about to let you go at it all on your own.”

Alucard stifled a moan as the strong digits inside of him brushed across that place that made his body begin to tremble; tremors of longing that begged to feel more of the Belmont’s rhythm but still feared what that might mean. His muted response, however, obviously did not go unnoticed as the hunter made to touch him there again, and again, until he felt himself growing hard against the rough cotton below. 

Trevor was not trifling with him though, and it was clear that the purpose of his movements was to prepare the dhampir for something more. Alucard even perceived that the effects on him were becoming quite intense. The hunter might be otherwise uncouth, but his shabby gentility had nothing so characteristic than the precision with which he made the other man ready. There was, as always, as unnatural calmness to him and an unwholesome gloss to the motion that suggested clandestine revenge. This wasn’t just going to be about simple desire, or the intent to observe him; something more was at stake in the dhampir’s obedience.

“On your knees.” The hunter commanded, sliding his hand free as he rose up to the edge of the bed.

As Alucard moved to comply, he chanced a look to his side where Sypha still rested, though she had grown unusually quiet. He was rather surprised then to see her smiling down at him with a relaxed, gentle, expression; tangling her fingers into his hair as she stroked his cheek compassionately. She then even squirmed closer to him and the dhampir realized that she intended, in some way, to shepherd him through what was to come; to shelter him from perhaps another kind of tempest.

When Trevor’s weight dipped the bed behind him, Alucard tensed. He had remained supine but had only raised his body up enough to brace himself in the folds of the bedclothes. Here then the hunter grasped tightly onto his hips, his fingers digging into the juncture between ilium and thigh, and pulled him back until the dhampir could clearly feel the hard, eager, cock throbbing against him. Trevor paused then, however; bringing both hands up to lightly massage his skittish consort. 

“This, Adrian.” He said, still kneading his fingers in easy circles. “This…is how we practice control.”

Alucard took a breath and released it slowly. The unpredictability of everything had him feeling volatile, even agitated. But he couldn’t deny the promise of it, either. The anticipation of the Belmont hunter mounting him, thrusting into him, of claiming him completely was just nigh of sheer madness. He’d have to be a lunatic to want this, and yet, he wondered if Trevor would come inside of him. Would he want to? Should he ask him?

But then, the man breached him. 

The cry that followed was sharp and full. There was a sudden, searing, pain and then the harsh burn of the stretch as the dhampir’s body worked to accept another man for the very first time. It was near to being wounded but also not unlike the fever of challenging an opponent in a hard battle. 

Anticipate. 

Parry. 

Riposte…

…Yield.

He heard the hunter growl over him and felt the sting of another bite at his neck. Overwhelmed and insensible, the dhampir almost attempted to crawl away from the offense but only got as far as scrabbling onto the top filigree edge of the headboard before he was held firmly in place by insistent hands that demanded he submit as he was penetrated in one powerful stroke. Alucard could feel every measure of the length sliding into him as Trevor took full delight in his conquest; every curve and ridge dragging against the shockingly sensitive skin of his passage.

With his fingernails digging furrows into the wood, Alucard bit through a deep, hurt, moan just as the hunter brought his hips flush against him. A droplet and a tear hovered at the corner of the dhampir’s eye until they lost their balance – slid an inch and waited for further reinforcement – swelled again, rolled, stopped, and then fell onto the back of Sypha’s hand. With a contorted mouth, she held it up for him to see before tipping Alucard’s gaze to meet hers with the same hand that curried his anguish.

“What do you feel?” She asked him.

His articulation was still confused and his tongue refused to comply. Three times he tried the same words and three times he could only keen breathlessly. Trevor, however, was having less trouble in that respect.

“Oh, fuck.” He groaned, falling forward to lay his chest against Alucard’s back. Having raised his upper half nearly vertical by gripping onto the top of the bed, the dhampir had unintentionally managed to adjust their angle in just such a way that their combined postures only tantalized and excited the hunter further. “Dear _God_ , you’re tight. So…fucking…tight.”

Sypha had already taken mercy on the dhampir though and was engaged in fervently kissing him as the hunter carefully steadied himself and tried his first shallow thrust. An exhilarated moan later and he thrust again, a little harder. It was then that he heard Alucard gasp, breaking from Sypha’s kisses with a feral growl. His teeth were also far more prominent now than they had been and it was obvious to both that the dhampir was beginning to struggle with his instincts. He still had not managed to speak.

Trevor motioned to Sypha with a glance behind him, indicating that he wanted her away from Alucard for the moment; or at least his mouth and his nails if nothing else. With a pointed look, she nodded and left the two of them for the pile of comfortable pillows she had arranged at the foot of the bed; having predicted the possibility of just such a moment. Trevor had assured her of his attentions later on but for this, he needed leave to manage the dhampir in whatever way he found necessary.

Now certain of her well-being, Trevor returned to the man beneath him. With his right hand he reached up to take a hold of the back of Alucard’s neck, with his left, he held onto the hard crest of his hip. He also smiled slightly when he then felt the dhampir strengthen his grip on the headboard and subtly push back against him. When the hunter drew away again, he took the time to slowly slide himself out of his lover’s body before steadying him for a full, deep, thrust. A soft sob fell from the dhampir’s lips in response. Trevor then thrust again; finally beginning a consistent rhythm of pulling back and driving forward to plunge his aching manhood into the dhampir’s waiting body; shifting from provisionally testing Alucard to thoroughly fucking him.

“Adrian.” Trevor ground out as his pace increased. “By all that is holy and _shit_ you feel good.”

Alucard, for his part, was utterly beside himself. The pain had waned as the hunter had begun to move in earnest; the burn subsiding as the thick organ moved securely with each solid thrust. And as Trevor began to soundly strike the pleasurable places inside of him he’d only just discovered he had, the dhampir felt a terrifying change prickling through him. The feeling of the hunter’s domination, of the governing hands subduing him, had him desperately hard again and to his absolute shame, he was beginning to feel as if he might come straight away from Trevor’s cock alone; otherwise virtually untouched. To his dismay, the hunter mating him had finally done his work to truly awaken the darkness in his heritage, and Alucard found himself fighting the violent urge to turn on the man and to sink his fangs directly into his throat. 

It was also mortifying, the way he wantonly rolled and surged with the hunter’s forceful thrusts; panting and sighing as none other than Trevor Belmont fucked him with uncalled for vigor.

“That’s it.” He heard him say. “That’s what I knew I was going to see.”

Alucard snarled at him, arching his back to try and twist out of the hunter’s grip: every tangled fiber filtering down through his corrupted body craving the glory of a kill.

“Oh, no you don’t.” Trevor quickly re-instantiated his hold by coiling several available locks of platinum hair through his fingers. When he then forced the dhampir’s head back he was greeted by another angry snap of bared fangs.

“Yeah, I know what you want.” He hissed into Alucard’s ear. “But you’re not getting it. This is what you’ll get.” A deep thrust accentuated his point. “So how about you tell me how it feels, hmm? How does it feel to have me inside you? To be held down, defenseless like a fussy little fledgling, beneath me? And that I’m going to fuck you until I’m good and finished?”

“Trevor…” Was all the dhampir was able to get out in response.

“Trevor what?”

“Please…please I’m…”

“Going to come?”

Ravished, Alucard began to openly cry out. Everything was crashing down around him and he was soon in agony. Pleasure lanced through his body so ferociously that he could hardly breath: unconsciously bowing lower and spreading his thighs to better take the aggressive thrusts that riled him and shook the bed. He felt exposed and raw, but still covered and bound. He could barely make out the sound of what must have been Sypha whispering comforts to him as the first signs of climax began to overtake them both. Trevor was pounding into him with growing fervor, causing his organ to glide over the dhampir’s most sensitive places with relentless perfection. He was lost. The rapture had found him, every muscle in his body was tightening and contracting. He was going to shatter.

Trevor must have felt the change in him as well because, seconds later, the hunter’s rough calloused hand had grabbed a hold of the dhampir’s weeping sex and was stroking him to a messy completion. 

“Come for me, Adrian.”

“I…. I…. _ohh_ …”

“I want to see you come for me… _while_ I’m fucking you. Spill yourself with my cock inside you.”

He couldn’t…

There wasn’t…

Alucard screamed. 

Throwing himself backwards, he was suddenly held upright as Trevor continued to caress him with a fast, tight, grip. Finally, with a gratifyingly loud wail, in the confines of the curtained room, the dhampir came; pouring out his passion onto the hunter’s clenched fist as he bucked and thrashed wildly in his arms. It was as if the walls around Alucard’s mind had simply crumbled, the palisades reduced to ruin and the gates torn down, as he gave up his very essence to the Belmont’s demand and lost every definition of himself to the delirium of a devastating climax: his grief, his purpose, even his own name.

The hunter found him absolutely glorious in release; head back, fangs bared, his hands now clamped onto Trevor’s hips still thrusting into him as he rode the waves of orgasm and euphoria into sobbing fits. He begged the hunter for quarter, moaned and pleaded for solace. He even momentarily sought penance for the sins he now rejoiced in. When the dhampir then fell forward onto the bed, his nails shredding the blanket near his head, Trevor was finally ready to give it to him. 

“Hold still…” He gasped, his hands returning to Alucard’s waist so as to contain him. He needn’t have however, as the other lay completely pliant, if quaking, beneath him.

Trevor thrust as hard as his considerable fortitude was capable of, briefly reveling in the dhampir’s exhausted compliance and the fact that Alucard’s halfling state made actual injury unlikely, before finally meeting his own end. He rocked into the dhampir with the full force of his strength, making sure that Alucard felt every last movement, every last piercing stab. It was then all Trevor could do to hold on to him as he groaned through his own release; pinning the other’s flanks as he spent himself as deeply inside the other man as he possibly could. It was bliss to watch the dhampir shudder as the hunter’s copious seed warmed his core from the inside.

Alucard descended away from himself just as he received the final jolts of the hunter’s momentum. He knew that Trevor was being intentionally brusque; making it clear that he had had him, had relieved him of any innocence that might have remained, had violated whatever virtue the dhampir imagined still existed. But then the hunter collapsed onto him, whispering something dark and contemptible into his sweat-dappled skin. Words that might as well have been the same as those they’d heard earlier on the wind unfortunately, because he understood the sounds but not the meaning.

What he did catch however, before sleep stole him away, was Sypha’s reply to something Trevor had kept from him. And even as he drifted into nothingness, he wondered at its significance.

“Because we too often remember only the ones who hurt us.” She sighed. “Not the ones who become part of us.”


	6. Grim and Proper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Alright, here we have some plot to start with; because this story does eventually need to go somewhere...and then some "plot;" which is what we're all here for anyway. Enjoy. - Nas)

**Grim and Proper**

That night, Alucard was plagued by strange dreams. As a child, he had once spent long summers walking in the fields behind his mother’s clinic. One particularly cloudless day, he had come upon a large, flat, stone, which lay – no one knows how long – in the center of the pasture, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all around it. He had then, in obedience to the kind of whims native to childhood, insinuated his foot under the highest rim and overturned it as someone might an overly browned cake. Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if bleached and ironed. Frightening, crawling, creatures scattering out of their hidden community; scarabaeus and turtle-bugs, they had been called. Dermestids and millipedes, accompanying. Black, glossy, crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of a four-horse stage-coach and motionless, slug-like, things. Larva; perhaps even more horrifying to him in their pulpy stillness than if they had leapt out fully matured. But no sooner was the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon the oppressed and blinded society than each and every member rushed away wildly, crashing into each other, in a veritable panic to retreat from everywhere poisoned by sunshine.

He saw it all again now as if having returned to a place he was certain had long been plowed under. But he couldn’t grasp its meaning, since he wasn’t convinced it ever had one. The stone was little more than an ancient, glacial, error; the grass not crushed but merely misfortunate for having fallen there and attempting to grow where it was not wanted. The shapes which were found beneath were all the craftier things that sought out and thrived in darkness rather than the weaker beings made helpless by it. Turning the stone was therefore the only real act of malice in this regard; because the cocoons that hold such grubs are unchanging. None will ever find themselves with wings by virtue of the stone having been lifted.

But it was here that Alucard perceived himself, not the child, but the worm. He withdrew from the light and found himself walking through the insect paths in the soil; transformed into a cistern now, actually (in the way that dreams are wont to do). Built long ago of the same such cobbles as had been scattered as stepping stones throughout the back countryside of his youth. Water flowed past his feet and trickled up scarred walls to feed the mosses and lichens that anchored there. Roots dangled from the arch overhead; swaying in an unseen breeze. The sounds of wind above and streams below made up the bellows that breathed stale air into the rock-lined throat of the tunnel, and with each exhalation, it murmured the words he had heard before.

“Rā nōfer uben em īkar…netetjen ēēu…reyshut it mut…”

But his mind, steeped in the universal knowledge of the subconscious, understood it.

“A beautiful day to rise…you are welcome here…let your father and mother be glad…”

He felt a presence. Something stirring in the depths. And he was afraid.

“Adrian…” It called. “I can _feel_ you close to me, Adrian.” 

How to describe a voice such as the one he could feel resonating throughout his chest and echoing in the tympanics of his skull. How it reduced him utterly, from a man to a nursling; his fangs to milk-teeth; his inherited strength to senescence a thousand leagues from sunset. It was St. Thomas trying to interpret the Leviathan and painting only a Hellmouth, into whose maw the damned must walk on the Last Judgement.

“I know you.” The intonation made the very stones themselves lament and shudder; grinding like bones on their mortars. “I tasted your soul in the crypts at Gresit, your wounds weeping into the ground all around the tomb that held you. Where _I_ held you. Now, you come to me again. Bringing me your pain and your fear; all of the terrors in the night that remind you of the fact that your grandest accomplishment, of murdering your own father, will go largely unnoticed. Or is it that now and forever the people of Wallachia will believe that your kith and kin are nothing more than vomitous debris cast off from the spittle of a detestable God and that ultimately, you are too? Tell me, Adrian, does this frighten you or excite you?”

Alucard grimaced and tried to clear his head. “Who are you?” He growled. 

“What a benignly pompous question.” 

The dhampir shivered. Such a rich, deep, sound that wasn’t really sound at all but the vibrations of a carillon ringing only its largest and most sonorous bells. He forced himself to press on into darker catacombs.

“Of course, you must think me very dull as well.” It continued. “Private theater is never what it promises to be, is it? Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies who do not think it necessary to over-mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines but wouldn’t we rather see the characters show their good graces and talents than announce them from the limelight? So, you must forgive me in that it has been so long since I have seen a fresh, unrouged, high-bred, half-blood such as yourself. With a lissome figure and an alluring voice; acting out a love-drama to make us all young again. How jejunity plays for us.”

Alucard did not want to even begin speculating as to what the last part might be in reference to. Was this thing watching him? Watching them all? For how long?

“You didn’t answer my question.” He replied instead.

“True. I did not.”

But then the dream shifted around him; almost palpable in the sensations of drifting, floating, and then…falling. The passage tilted and became a well, a hole in the earth with no bottom, gaping and gulping; and he could not slow himself from tumbling into it.

Alucard was unsure as to what exactly it was that he saw then. A figure, for certain. The shape of a man forming out of the gloom as it crawled upwards towards him. At first, he appeared to be a noble; a great cloak swirling around him as he became clearer against the black abyss. But it was with a gasp that the dhampir realized that it was no velvet or wool that made it; the mantle he wore was a cascade of blood! It flowed downwards from his neck and shoulders, enveloping his silhouette and obscuring its true outline but it moved as fabric would: fastened and folded in every way as to be the recognizable guise of an aristocrat.

The thing reached both hands up as if to catch him. Claws; deadly thickets of nightshade thorns curling out from knotted, oaken, hands. A mouth, ringed with bramble teeth to receive him.

“Don’t be afraid, Adrian.” It said. “What I would do to you…isn’t half of what _he_ will…”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alucard awoke with a start; immediately raising his head to locate the source of the danger. But there was none. Everything was dark, quiet, and just splendidly warm. He was still in bed; the heavy curtains having been drawn completely around it to block out the flickering of the fireplace he could hear crackling comfortingly beyond. His companions lay on either side of him: Trevor snoring softly at his back and Sypha snuggled into his chest. At some point she had even managed to wedge her head between the pillow and his neck, and was therefore resting her cheek flat against his sternum. He also surmised that the two of them had, at some point, gotten dinner while he was asleep. He could smell food somewhere in the room.

Calmed, he debated as to whether or not he should try to extricate himself from the two of them and get up or if he was content to return to sleep for a while longer. He was unsure. The nightmare was fading but he couldn’t shake the unease it had left him with. Alucard sighed. So much had happened in such a very short amount of time that he felt as though his entire world had shifted on its axis; careening through space in a new and completely uncharted direction among hostile stars and comets. It wasn’t like him to be so restless or irritable, but lately his mind had turned downright choleric. Not that it was all entirely his doing, of course.

Trevor shifted and murmured in his sleep, bringing the dhampir completely back to the present moment. He was still nude; skin to skin with both hunter and mage. The heat of their bodies soothed him, however, and he found their commingled scent to be quite sedating. He reddened at the memory of what had brought him to this point though. How he had been caught, bridled, and broken. The stunning pain of being taken; the unrivaled pleasure of getting fucked. His adolescent imaginings, creative as they had been, could never have predicted that it would feel like…that.

A clocked ticked away his respite and Alucard was still rather lost in thought when he slowly came to realize that someone was touching him. _Oh so_ gentle hands caressing his side and then sliding meekly to his chest; warm, soft, lips at his neck, willowy thighs parting around his hips. Sypha’s breath tickled his chin as she touched the tip of her tongue to his jawline and he realized that she meant for him to tip his head down for a kiss.

He met her lips tentatively, intensely aware of his sharp teeth around the delicate explorations she made of his mouth. But the kisses were supple and tender, drawing him in further and further until he breathlessly rolled on top of her. What manner of strange, secretive, seduction was this? Had she been waiting for him to wake? The dhampir’s heart fluttered in response. He had never before been enfolded in a woman’s body like this; nestled into the flare of her hips and fit against her completely with only a breadth of space to enable a few furtive touches. A dangerous flash of desire arced through him and he nearly growled at her when her hand found his quickly lengthening manhood. Her strokes were unexpectedly sure and practiced however, bringing him to full hardness within moments.

Alucard began to pant harshly. After a life of conscientious celibacy, he was being coaxed into wanton arousal for the third time in one night. He was still a bit sore though, to his relative surprise. Trevor had worked him hard for his first time, and his regeneration had not yet caught up with the strain. But he was also calmer than he had been; his senses almost meditative in the way that he was able to focus first on one feeling, then another. Perhaps Trevor had been right, and for now, the vampire had been tamed enough to regard this new encounter as beneath its notice.

Sypha then, with the same placid ease, started to guide him into her but when she gasped, he pulled back and tensed with worry. She immediately quieted him with whispered words.

“It’s ok.” She laughed with a light, mirthful, voice. “I just need to get used to the feel of you.”

When she pressed her hands into his lower back to encourage him again, he followed; entering her as carefully and compassionately as he could. But the sudden heat and pressure that surrounded him caused him to lunge forward in an almost stumble; taking her zealously in a way he hadn’t meant to. Hot. Wet. Tight around him. He moaned with the need of her and she cried out for the want of him.

It was again so different than what he had already experienced and it continued to unmoor him. How was such pleasure possible, how is it that it could take so many different forms; contouring to his appetites as a multi-course feast? She was docile, where Trevor had been determined; tractable, where he had been unruly. Loving, where he had been merciless. But her touch was confident and assertive, pressing the dhampir into the rhythm she wanted with one hand on his hip and the other at his flank.

He began to move on her; in her. Sliding back and then thrusting forward in long, deep, strokes. Keeping her close; one palm flat on the inside of her thigh so that he could hold her open for him, he sighed with the exquisite pleasure of it. Each time she accepted him was, in a word, sublime. In every way that he could, Alucard made love to Sypha; his body undulating in powerful waves that drove him into her with increasing abandon.

She moaned for him; softly calling his name and wrapping her arms around his shoulders as he learned the sensual motions of sex from the dominant side. He kissed her, suckled at the skin of her throat, thumbed the pert nipple of her breast as Trevor had shown him, and then bore down onto her with short, hard, thrusts that had her begging him for more.

“Adrian… _yes…ohh_ …like that…”

She was close. Tightening around him with convulsive strength. But something else was happening and Alucard had the uncomfortable sense that something was wrong. Her sweetness, her gentle ardor, her loving trust and succor…

…it hurt worse than Trevor’s brutality.

The fangs in his mouth protracted and his jaw ached as they distended onto his lower lip. Her scent, the scent of her wet sex, the scent of his own gliding in and out of her, was taking him apart at the seams. The hunger, the void, inside of him wasn’t filling with the taste of her skin or the feel of her body beneath him; it demanded the nourishment of her blood – just there, right under the surface of her pale neck – where it would be so easy to reach. Small, red, rivulets trickling past him in an oasis of succulent flesh. Just a small cut, a shallow passionate bite in the heat of coupling, and it could be his. He could take her throat just as deliciously as he was taking her sheath. Receive her essence as he gave her his.

Sypha felt the hard shudder that passed through him, but in her haze, mistook it for the beginnings of the dhampir’s final release. He was shaking so hard she held him even closer to her, throwing one leg completely around his waist as his thrusts became rough and uncoordinated. She could feel his length deep inside of her, inches from her womb almost, and sighed happily as it appeared that he would soon climax.

“Adrian…” She murmured again, digging her fingers into the muscles of his shoulders. “It’s ok…I’m ready for you…”

Alucard could feel his eyes bleed into red and his nails blacken; extending from his fingertips in instinctual anticipation of needing to hold down his prey as he consumed her. He fought it – was fighting it – but he was losing. The creature inside of him tore through his consciousness; mocking him with the image of thrusting, and coming, into a limp and lifeless woman as he drained her of everything through garish wounds ripped into her prone body. He shuddered again and cried out; but not in rapture, in terror.

Sypha went rigid beneath him; unashamedly calling out her bliss as she came. He could feel it. The hard, spasmodic, waves as she clenched around him. The slick ease with which he could take her deeply no matter how much her body began to resist. His own excitement was beginning to break, his seed brimming, his cock close to bursting but also his mouth descending onto the column of her exposed neck, teeth poised to claim her wholly. He laid the flat of his tongue onto the pulsing vein at the juncture of her shoulder and was about to give in to the inevitable…

…when shocking, white-hot, pain suddenly ripped through him; cleaving his mind in two as he was forced up by a hand gripping onto all of the hair at the back of his head.

The dhampir arched, trying to alleviate the strain; heaving angry, terrified, breaths as Trevor Belmont; obviously having observed everything, took a hold of him and brought him up to his knees. Alucard bent and wrenched at the restraint, but not before the hunter snarled a dangerous warning into his ear.

“Don’t you _fucking_ dare or I’ll be keeping what’s left of you in a goddamn pill box.”

Alucard stilled, both mortified at having been so close to harming Sypha and fearful as to how Trevor was going to react to it. It didn’t help either that he was at the crumbling edge of release himself and was barely coherent with fractious lust. At first, however, the hunter simply held the dhampir safely upright as the woman beneath him recovered from her own orgasm and came back to herself. It took a minute, but when she was finally in command of her wits again and was able to uncouple from the dhampir and move away, he nudged him forward; indicating that Alucard was to place his hands back onto the bed and remain kneeling. 

“Trevor…” He heard Sypha say as he did so. “I’m fine. He was wonderful! You don’t…”

“I’m not going to kill him, Syph.” Trevor replied in an oddly menacing tone for such a reassurance. “Adrian and I just need to…reach an understanding.”

Gracefully, Trevor then took up a position behind Alucard, still continuing to keep the dhampir’s head bowed with a harsh grip at the base of his neck. Situated, he then slowly allowed him to rise until his back met the hunter’s chest.

“That was a very bad thing you almost did, wasn’t it?” He whispered, pulling the other man’s head to the side. But Alucard’s response was shaken and nearly inaudible.

“Yes.” 

“Any other Belmont would probably whip that impulse right out of you. Lash you bloody until you screamed for mercy.”

“Yes.”

“You could probably escape, though. Fight hard enough, break my hold, and vanish into the woods out there faster than I could catch you. But do you want to know why I don’t think you’ll do that?”

Alucard swallowed. “Yes.”

“Because right now, every last bit of sense left in your head knows that if you do, you’ll never see either of us again, you’ll face Dracula in all his shit-fucked glory alone, and, most importantly for tonight, you won’t know whether or not I intended to punish you for what you’ve done or get you off properly.”

The dhampir couldn’t suppress the pained moan in response. He was aching and desperate for release but what he would have given for the darkness to take him then instead, because, by the feel of the hunter’s hard cock at his back, he had no doubt that Trevor would. 

“So, what’s it gonna be?” 

“I…Trevor please…”

“Oh, no. You’re going to _ask_ for it. Look at Sypha and tell me what you deserve. Tell me what I should do to you, you fucking parasite.”

Despite his insulting words, the hunter’s hands finally left their harsh grip in the dhampir’s hair and began to drift over his torso; fingers skating up along the lines between the muscles of his abdomen and then down over the slight curve of his belly. When Trevor’s hand then suddenly smoothed over his shaft and began to stroke him, Alucard simply let his head fall back onto the hunter’s shoulder so that he could turn his face and meet his lips.

He was going to regret this.

“If you think you’re owed my surrender, Belmont; just try it. Well? Can a mud-licking peasant half-wit fuck me into submission… or not?”

Somewhere, in the depths of his unconscious mind, Adrian Țepeș was sure he could hear someone laughing.


	7. Night Terrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (I have some other writing deadlines to get to here in the next couple of weeks, so I wanted to get this out as soon as possible. Plenty more drama where this came from though. - Nas)

**Night Terrors**

There is an imperfect consciousness in every hour of the night, in that its essence consists of only a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches. It may only offer a single instance of feigned illumination, but always separated from the rest – red, yellow, deep blue, or any intermediate shade of violet – upon an object. Never full and complete white light. There are beautiful effects from this, of course – in all the prismatic colors – but never the thing in question as it is in fair daylight. Which is why the mind is so very terrified by all it fails to see when the sun is not there to confess the whole of the truth.

It was, in this way, that the moon, itself biased, fell upon an open window which overlooked a shadow box room fragmented in the titian reflection of a dying hearth fire.

“You know what I think, Adrian?” Trevor’s tone was frighteningly genial. “I think Sypha was, for once, only about half right. You see, she believes that you are, deep down, truly good. Like some misunderstood saint here to offer us all our undeserved forgiveness. And that everything else is just worse for wear because people treat you like dog shit.”

Alucard could do nothing but breathe, still entrapped in the hunter’s arms, kneeling upright with the larger man pressed into his back and against his hind-side.

“I, on the other hand,” He continued. “Think it’s more complicated than that. Should I tell you?”

“I believe you will tell me no matter what I say, Belmont.”

Trevor chuckled; his voice still ominously calm. “A hundred years from now, Adrian…shit, maybe two or three hundred years from now, you’ll still be around. Theoretically, anyway. And I’m willing to bet that you’ll come to know any Belmont that has the misfortune of following after me. Maybe you’ll even tell them about me. But what concerns me more than that, is the possibility that I either have here my great-great-grandchildren’s most invaluable friend…or their worst enemy.”

The dhampir hissed as the hand that had momentarily stopped stroking him began to do so again.

“That’s why,” The hunter whispered into his ear. “What I _should_ do, if I’m being honorable to my family, as you might say, is _kill_ you. Right here, right now, just like this. Take your head clean off your shoulders and hold a nice memorial over there in the fireplace while I burn your thick skull into ashes.” Trevor’s other hand caressed Alucard’s exposed throat, accentuating the threat.

The dhampir had little doubt that some part of Trevor meant what he said. Trevor might not have had the benefit of the extensive education that Alucard had enjoyed, but he wasn’t stupid (despite the themes of their shared insults) and the Belmont clan had certainly known multi-generational enemies before. This had always been the boon and the curse of Family in a world that presumed the immutable and inevitable heredity of blood. Take after one's father, for example, and be compared to an apple who'd fallen not far from the tree. Go down the road on your own however, and be accused of incipient rot. In this life, it was inescapable to be seen as the image of one’s paternity. Trevor didn't think he took very much after either of his parents though, and Alucard worried he was too much like both.

A tremor passed through them equally but the dhampir spoke first. “Is that what you think of me, Belmont? That I am some…rudimentary form of a greater evil? Dracula, on the day he first began to embody that name? Because, if so, then you should do it.” The tension between them coiled tighter. “It is what you want, _isn’t it_? Fuck me, then kill me? Prove yourself the superior predator? Live up to that grand and glorious reputation of the monsters who destroy monsters.”

The hand around his neck suddenly clenched, effectively cutting him off from saying anything more. With a strange sort of passive sense, however, Alucard noted that the hunter’s grip; though tight enough to prevent him from speaking, wasn’t quite hard enough to actually strangle him. He could breathe but only shallowly. My, but Trevor was remarkably controlled when he wanted to be.

“Then there’s the part of you that wants to die, yeah?” The hunter replied lowly. “Wouldn’t you rather I just end you now? Save you the trouble of having to think about it later? You die. Dracula dies. And the world is a little better for it. You think you deserve it. You _want_ to deserve it. You wouldn’t still be here if you _didn’t._ ”

Pain. What a useless word. Four letters inside of a single syllable that encompassed everything and meant nothing. A bird breaking its neck on a window felt pain. A child at the bedside of a dying parent felt pain. A village burned whole felt pain. But this was none of those and yet, what welled up from everywhere inside of him had Alucard at a loss for any other descriptor. Suffering. Shame. Despair. Abandonment.

Pain.

The dhampir suddenly withered in his arms with a choked, anguished, sound and Trevor was forced to embrace Alucard just to keep him from falling completely slack. Nor did he resist when the hunter grasped onto his thigh to pull him back up again. As his fingers splayed onto the massive scar across the dhampir’s chest, Trevor was even somewhat shocked to feel the roped and knotted skin pulse with heat. Alucard was almost always ever cool to the touch.

“Trevor.” Sypha’s voice came sternly from the creeping shadows near the foot of the bed. “That’s enough.”

Alucard had kept his eyes tightly closed, fearing that tears would follow any such sight as might be before him. The sorrow that still dogged his every waking step was not far beneath the surface of where the hunter’s hands were set against him; the most obvious outward evidence of the familial violence he had already suffered in life. He didn’t know why Trevor’s words cut so deeply but the old wound had begun to ache again. Then, a warm presence came around them and approached him from the front.

“Adrian.” He heard her soft appeal. “Adrian, look at me.”

Reluctantly, he did so; opening his eyes to finally meet the gentle mage’s gaze where she now sat at the head of the bed. 

“Sypha, I…. I’m sorry…I…”

She shook her head. “It was too much to ask of you. You weren’t ready yet.”

Alucard thought then that she meant to leave him; to withdraw and relinquish him to the hunter’s treatments. It seemed the obvious choice. But instead, she positioned herself with her back to headboard, facing him; sitting comfortably with her legs folded beneath her. When she then reached for the dhampir’s wrist, he was curious to see that she was guiding him to grasp onto the top of the wooden plank with both hands on either side of her. As such, it resulted in a position where Alucard remained kneeling at the center of the mattress, Trevor behind him, and Sypha in front of him; nose to nose with the dhampir in the teasing semblance of a near kiss.

He felt it as Trevor’s hand flattened against his lower back, and Alucard could no longer suppress the shiver that followed it up his spine and onto the back of his neck. He already had a sense of what was coming. The hunter’s imagination was of the vulgarly poetic kind; a class of spite-kindled genius only given to him to compensate for the imperfections of his nature. This meant that he was sensitive to those impressions which blunter minds neglected, or never felt at all. It was something that the dhampir had always known about men like Trevor Belmont. They almost always died young, and usually with a tinge of melancholy. But there was no more beautiful illustration of Divine benevolence than the fact that the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs came from the infirmities which rendered their subjects unfit for the decrepit longevity of life.

The hand at his neck held him fast, and the dhampir now knew, with wilting certainty, that Trevor fully intended to take him again. But this time, he would be forced to face his own imminent transgression. Sypha would remain before him, only inches from his parted mouth, as Trevor fucked him into ruin. He would not be allowed a taste of her; her nearness and her warmth, yes, but not her blood or the salt of her flesh. He would be kept close to her while the hunter took his pleasure inside him; reminding him with each savage thrust that he was not in control. Alucard’s fingers tightened onto the headboard and he heard a faint, but distinct, crack.

Her fingers tickled across his collar bone and then to his face, keeping the dhampir steady as Trevor shifted over him. Tenderly, she carded her fingers through his hair, all the while the anticipation had him on a knife’s edge. Alucard had always believed he was caught between two worlds but now the metaphor seemed cruelly physical. Real, in a way it had no right to be.

“Breathe, Adrian.” Sypha whispered against his lips. “Breathe with me.”

He tried to do as she asked but the slow, intended, exhalation burst out of him with a shocked cry. He was still raw, used; scraped clean of his defenses, and the feeling of Trevor’s abrupt and unceremonious penetration caused his entire body to tense frightfully. He heard the hunter growl in response but he didn’t dare fight him on this. Every inch of the thick organ sliding into him pulsed with the threat of an angry and thorough congress. 

Trevor, for his part, paused just as soon as he’d taken the dhampir to the hilt. Not only did he quite simply relish the tight heat of Alucard’s body (something he had not anticipated in the halfling’s physiology) but he found the play of the muscles along his slender back to be unusually enticing. He loved to watch him strain against the submission demanded of him, and to work to receive him, no matter how much he might instinctually refuse. He knew that Alucard must be feeling everything acutely at the moment, but that was the point: he would have nothing left to fight back with when he was done.

For the time being however, Trevor allowed Sypha to murmur her comforts to the dhampir as he began a steady rhythm. He was firm but not rough; pulling back almost to the precipice of withdrawing completely before sliding back into his lover with a full thrust. By all that was unhallowed and depraved, the dhampir felt so good. His strong, leonine, body had just the right curves and hollows to appeal to the hunter’s basest lusts and watching him tighten and shake with each movement inside of him told Trevor exactly how to accomplish his goal. How to fuck the dhampir into submission.

Alucard reared up as the hand at the back of his neck dug into his skin. Trevor had picked up the pace but still continued to thrust into him with jarring force. The pain of it gnawed at him but the pleasure was quickly becoming more than he could endure. It wasn’t just the satisfaction of the purely physical motion; of a man’s hard cock buried inside of him and smoothly pressing against the hidden places that brought him bliss, but the power in his actions. He had fought Trevor before, in the tomb at Gresit, where the hunter had, to his shock and consternation, anticipated some of his most devastating attacks and had countered them thusly. And here it was again; where Alucard tried to arch or turn to alleviate the pressure building in his core, Trevor would bend to meet him. He was to be given no solace now; not until the hunter got what he really wanted. The dhampir clenched and moaned, trying to find some relief. 

It was the wrong thing to do.

The hunter snarled over him and immediately thrust even harder; using his opposite hand to hold onto Alucard’s hip and keep him in place. But for the dhampir, the combined sensations of once more being brought to heel in obedience to Trevor’s punishing desires and Sypha’s light caresses and sweet-tempered words had him quickly unravelling. He was too close. He needed…he desperately needed…He suddenly lunged forward, fangs bared; snapping at the too-near flesh of the woman consoling him. But the Belmont hunter knew his quarry far too well and had leashed the beast quite literally. His hand now wrapped around the dhampir’s throat, the other holding his waist, as he rode him with carnal delight.

Sypha gasped. Alucard had very nearly connected with her shoulder and if it hadn’t been for the sudden movement on Trevor’s part, she had no doubt the bite would have been successful. Now, she trembled at the sight just inches before her; Adrian Țepeș in his full, supernatural, glory. He shrieked in righteous indignation at the coupling the hunter relentlessly subjected him to; his teeth razor sharp and furiously determined to wound. His nails had lengthened into terrifying claws slowly peeling the wood of the headboard apart at the grain on either side of her; splinters and fibers of aged oak becoming little more than decayed cotton and dust in his hands. But his eyes were the most frightening. Glittering, golden, and mesmerizing to behold; she felt almost compelled to slide nearer to him. 

Frightened? Indeed, she was. The heat in his fixed stare, the nigh malicious mirth in the creature behind his gaze. It made her feel as if there were a demon just beneath the surface of him with such a chord in its voice as to resonate some string within her soul that, if he spoke, she would leave all and follow him straight into the jaws of Erebus. But Sirens were a fable and no such natural chords or strings in souls could come to this kind of a wondrous harmony in mundane spaces. And, furthermore, his cries were not for her.

Alucard’s breaths were coming fast and harsh; his body almost panicking in an effort to breathe in enough to sustain consciousness. He had no choice but to move with the pounding thrusts that shook him, still gripping onto the head of the bed or be thrown to the ground. Sypha had backed up only as far as the furniture would allow her to, which wasn’t much considering that she was still seated in the space between the dhampir’s arms and his bowed head. It was then that she suddenly realized what Trevor had done. Not only was he driving Alucard into an abominable frenzy, he’d had every intention that she should see it up close and intimately personal. She had been in incredible danger with her affectionate seduction, and he wanted her to know it.

She shot the hunter a menacing look over Alucard’s shoulder but was met only with his smug smile in return.

Trevor wrenched the howling dhampir up by his neck, securely wrapping his palm and fingers just beneath his jaw so that he could press his lips to the other man’s ear.

“Do you see that, bloodsucking leech that you are? Do you see what you’ll do now? You’d kill her right now if I let you. Sweet, gentle, Sypha and you’d tear her apart while I watched. All just to feed that empty fucking _hole_ inside you. Look at her. _Look_ at her right now and tell me I’m wrong.”

The dhampir sobbed openly; his cries becoming mournful. 

“Adrian…” She spoke up softly; wanting to touch him and ease him but too afraid of what might result if she got any closer.

“I know you feel that.” Trevor continued, biting along the shell of the dhampir’s ear. “That hate, that rage; I want you to stay there. I want you to know that there is nothing you can do about it. You’re not getting what you crave. The only blood you’ll taste is your own when I break you into pieces. I’m not going to feed you but I am going to fuck you. Fuck you hard, whenever I feel like it; until you understand who you belong to.”

Something broke inside him. An insanity; the kind that could only be the product of an accurate mind overtasked to collapse. The mental machine, not one to break its own wheels or levers but in response to something thrown into them to stop their working. A weak mind, as his father used to say, could never accumulate enough force to hurt itself and, as such, stupidity often saved men from going mad. Those with logic in their heads and human feelings in their hearts, were then all too commonly the denizens of the asylum whenever the brutality of life showed itself to be heathenish and hopeless. Alucard railed. He thrashed in the hunter’s hold. Everywhere, everything was agony. His body was weakening beneath the onslaught; the short, hard, thrusts that split him open. The vampire screamed and surged; tearing through his soul as a storm breaker battering the rocks. He wanted death; the cold, unfeeling, grave, anything to escape the fury, the burning fever tearing him apart. He was facing the sun, undead and unprotected; disintegrating into embers dusted white in fatal demise. 

“Submit.” 

He could no longer tell who’s voice it was.

“Adrian.” Near to the side of his head. Ghosted over his mouth. “Give in.”

“Surrender.”

“Submit.”

The roaring in his ears faded as something clamored up to take its place. He had been too far gone for too long; incited and enraged at the bars of his cage until he had thrown himself against the lock. With one final scream, it shattered. An energy let loose, freeing him from the confines of his body. He let go of its hurts and its wants, left its torture behind; as one simply opens their hand to liberate a butterfly. Ecstasy crashed down around him, he couldn’t breathe; faltering and stuttering…and then he burst. 

Light, far in the distance, welcomed him into oblivion. There was no pain here, no enmity. A taste of mortality, of the essence that was now spilling inside of him as he was relieved of his own. All other things; above, beyond, and without, were silent.  


At last, he had found it.

_Release._

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sypha squared up her collar and stared across the small table where Trevor was now happily chewing his way through a few of the leftover peppered beef strips. It was early morning, but not much past 7am, she surmised. The clock in the hall had just chimed and the rustling of the cooks and patrons below was beginning. She happened a glance back towards the bed. Alucard was still soundly asleep, wrapped in the wool blanket, and hadn’t so much as twitched a finger since the fire had gone out. He looked peaceful and finally at rest. She sniffed testily. 

“You didn’t have to be so rough.” She flatly announced, her expression skewed into a slight pout.

Trevor looked up with an indifferent face. “Yes, I did.”

“You could have hurt him.”

“I _did_ hurt him.”

She opened her mouth to say more on the subject when he tapped the woodtop to redirect her attention.

“Syph, listen. You know I care about your well-being, right?”

She nodded. “But Trevor, I really don’t think that Adrian would have…”

“Nnnn!” He held up an offending finger. “Adrian is a dhampir. The son of Dracula. Heir and issue of the House of the Dragon. He’s not made of glass and he’s certainly not a toy.”

She was about to throw those words right back at him when the hunter continued. “He’s also not some tragic prince to be saved by the tender-hearted love of a starry-eyed woman. That’s just bullshit. Nice bullshit, but bullshit.”

“Or some, what was it, floating vampire Jesus?” She finished with a scowl.

“Only in the storybook pages, Syph. Only in the story books.”

It was a terribly bad habit but she picked at the chapped skin of her lower lip anyway. “He would have…then…”

Trevor made only the gargled sound of an affirmative noise. “And then I really would have killed him.”

“So.” She shifted uncomfortably, glancing back again to see that Alucard had not moved; he barely even breathed. “What now?”

“Now? Now we see what’s waiting for us in the foothills. Some horrible, grotesque, creature of Hell, I’m sure. Ought to be fun.”

“And…. Adrian?”

“It’s going to be Hell for him too.”

She didn’t ask for clarification.


	8. Necessary Evils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (A huge thank you to everyone for reading and commenting. Seriously. Your interest and engagement has really made working on this story worthwhile and has been one of the few bright spots for me in troubled times. I'm continuing to work on this piece every week and look forward to more doom, gloom, and drama that I can share with everyone! Enjoy! - Nas)

**Necessary Evils**

_Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same ways, -- and the fools know it._

Nicăieri. A town conceived of and built among the foothills of the Carpathians by those who knew the Carpathians; and structured in things both temporal and spiritual. A simple place, with little to recommend it, aside from a few picturesque homes on the outskirts of a tavern, a trading post, and single ramshackle cathedral in need of fieldstone patching. The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was, however, utterly confused and neutralized by the too common stories of actual life. A blacksmith who lost a daughter to Plague setting his forge at the edge of the cemetery and adorning every gravestone with an iron cross at his own expense. A priest long turned agnostic who, despite meticulously caring for the altars, could not bring himself to say Mass in public and drank his afternoons away at the mead wagon nearest the road. A merchant selling talismans to ward off the Evil Eye alongside witches’ tally sticks and Ottoman trinkets displayed with the same reverence as hand-tied rosaries of teak and maple. And at the center of it all, the skeleton of a criminal so old and broken that no one even remembered his name anymore and had simply left his macabre human detritus in stocks not used for two generations at least. But, despite the local reputation, his mummified visage wasn’t meant as a passing warning or threat of violence to arriving travelers. Rather, someone would have buried him years ago but for want of a suitable marker and something to write on it.

There was no better way to understand Nicăieri than as an ancient borough that had grown tired of its populace. An epitaph to a greater history may yet have been recorded in the documents and registers of the town hall but it had long ago decayed when the last of the baptismal waters dried up and the font filled with moss. Indeed, what could be more trivial than that old metaphorical story of a boy who opened a Chaucer folio that used to rest in some noble’s crumbling hall only to find flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in its pages a hundred years. It was the same everywhere in this foothill village; bustling with the atrophied remains of a bygone world toiling away in fields that would soon enough become their cremation grounds. 

The square common was busy for so late in the day but no one bothered to acknowledged the cart passing through the main gate and into the marketplace proper, and Trevor didn’t see reason to call attention to it. The rain had blessedly held off and after a full day’s ride in relative silence, he knew they were all ready to stretch and unwind. Alucard in particular had been unusually quiet; spending the afternoon in contemplation as he walked up alongside the horses at their withers rather than ride inside the wagon with his companions. Sypha, conversely, had busied herself within; sifting through tinctures and box kits in search of…diversion, Trevor presumed. The brittle remnants of sweet marjoram and pennyroyal she was endlessly transferring to other containers certainly weren’t going to provide her with anything else. He glanced down at the dhampir’s back as they entered town.

He and Sypha had left Alucard to dress and tend to himself alone after he’d finally awoken. When he had emerged from the rented room a half hour later, they’d barely spoken but to ensure that everyone was in agreement on the best way to travel further. Since then the dhampir hadn’t so much as turned to look at him despite the fact that the hunter sat only a few feet behind him and with a whip in his hand. Trevor admittedly wondered what he might be thinking. Was he angry? Ashamed? Vengeful?

Images of the previous night flashed through his mind. The seductive china-white texture of the dhampir’s skin as he caressed him, the feel of his potent strength just beneath the refined surface. How deliciously tight he had been when the hunter took him and just how much Trevor was looking forward to having him again. But this time, he chided himself, he would want Alucard on his back. He wanted to see his face when he finally submitted to his hunter’s desire. More than that, he also wanted to incite him; see if he could provoke the dhampir into a bite just as Sypha had almost inadvertently doomed herself to one. He wanted to see Alucard undone and in his break down, fight him. He would fight Trevor, not for domination, but annihilation. And Trevor very much enjoyed imagining how it would feel to pin the dhampir beneath his heavier weight again and feed him blood kisses until he sobbed for release.

As if in response to his thoughts, Alucard came to a sudden stop. But when he didn’t turn around to glower at him, Trevor grew worried.

“What is it?” The hunter called out, tightening his grip on the reins.

“I’m not sure.” The dhampir replied, tilting his head into the breeze. “Something seems…off…about this place.”

Trevor chuckled. There was something “off” about every place. Nicăieri certainly had no unique claim to fame where the superficially abnormal was concerned. But after a moment’s attention, the hunter began to perceive the substratal feeling that Alucard was referring to. There was, indeed, something strange in the air. Inobvious but appearing discreetly everywhere he looked. The people seemed regular enough but collectively inattentive; as if nothing and no one could sway them from their chores. The buildings were sturdy but slanted at subtly improper angles, the church bells hushed and all the children in hiding; since not a soul under the age of fifteen crossed their path in as many minutes.

Sypha climbed out onto the passenger seat next to Trevor and let her eyes wander the scene. “We should tie the wagon at the trading hitch. Should be safe there until we know where we’re going.” The hunter nodded. He was already regretting coming here. Beasts and horrors were one thing (and a thing he was always prepared for), but the kind of evil that existed simply to offend the dignity of the universe made his stomach turn.

Alucard allowed a few more denizens to pass by him before calling out to a man hauling wood towards the customs house. “You there! Where is the central magistrate?”

“No magistrate here, friend.” The man answered casually. “Broad Lane Inn is just up the way if you’re looking for lodgings. Trade Stocks’s there if you want coin.”

“I do not.” Alucard responded politely. “I need information.”

“Eh.” The laborer shrugged. “Talk to the priest then.”

“I said information, not admonition.”

The man actually laughed at that, much to Trevor’s wary concern. Did peasants usually have that kind of vocabulary? “I didn’t say you had to confess, friend. But if direction is what you’re after, I say again, talk to the priest.”

He indicated a hunched figure not far from them.

Trevor sighed, roping the wagon tie-line into a heavy, iron, hitching post before rejoining both dhampir and mage at the common’s edge. “Well, at least this priest is, from what I can tell, in good company.”

And by that, Alucard was perfectly well aware that the hunter meant ale.

Father Creţu sat at the lone brew-wagon set up at less than a hundred meters from the trading house entrance; a clay mug clenched tightly in white fingers below a scowl blurred from two days growth of peppered beard. What a poor wretch he presented, who would so readily sit down on the muddied cassock and threadbare stoles of his own reputation. The kind of man whom the papers would treat with an array of kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, so as to be at the service of a saintly churchman tasked with the precarious salvation of bucolic souls. But here, smaller authorships were the provenance of truth and would note that such chips of praise; fragrant, sugary, and sappy, were the fictions of all men of the cloth. Chips meant to hide the peeling veneer of brittle and unstable reputations that this man now openly drowned in sour mash and millet beer. Which is to say that he may have been ordained but no one would have mistaken Father Creţu for respected.

“Good morning.” Trevor greeted him heartily regardless, quickly taking up a stool poised on the man’s right and ordering himself a similar mug. Meanwhile, Alucard stayed to the background with Sypha nearby. He was overall mistrustful of priests and felt that this one would likely be better predisposed to the hunter’s manners than his, given their mutually disheveled appearances.

Father Creţu regarded Trevor Belmont with an uneasy look. “What do you want?”

“A drink?” He held up the cracked tankard smiling.

“I heard your friend, already.” He deadpanned. “More’n a drink you want.”

It was going to be like that, was it? Fine.

“Yeah, ok.” The hunter grumbled in return. “There is something else I want. It hasn’t escaped our notice that your quaint little hamlet here has been suffering some night troubles. We were on our way down this direction anyhow and thought we might be able to help with your problem.”

The priest was incredulous. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but no one here needs your help.”

“Really. And why do you say that?”

“We’ve already had our fair share of sellswords and mercenaries. All they do is make things worse. Best just be on your way. Go kill some hellspawn somewhere else.”

Alucard interjected. “Reports are clear that you’ve suffered more than a hellspawn attack. There is something living in this town. Something unholy.”

Here Father Creţu laughed; coughing crudely into the foam at the rim of his cup. “Oh, I see. And you think you’ll be the ones to finally root it out, do you?”

“There have been others?”

The slovenly priest briefly appraised the dhampir from his stool; so obviously taken with Alucard’s form that Trevor very nearly slapped the man for the salacious way in which he moistened his bottom lip with the edge of his tongue. 

“Oh, yeah.” He finally replied. “Long line of eager adventurers hoping to make a name for themselves. Same result every time, though. They go out, they don’t come back in. Once you cross the meadow boundary, you can never leave this place. Haven’t you heard? Come by the road and the south gate, go out by the road and the south gate, and you’re fine. Good trade, good food, all’s well. Walk over the threshold of the north gate and you’re in _his_ domain. And _he_ never lets anyone return.”

“Hrmph.” Trevor chuffed sarcastically. “Well, _he_ never met _us_.”

Sypha swatted him and turned to Father Creţu. “It sounds like Nicăieri has been enthralled. What manner of creature has done this to you? Why haven’t you called for aid?”

The priest smiled. “Honestly, sister? Because there are many men in this town who believe we’re simply better off for it. No hellspawn come here. Ever. No terrors in the night. No vampires. No lycanthropes or witch’s familiars. And no demons. There’s just him. We pay our taxes in blood, you might say, but the lord of this manner extends his protection completely and there are plenty who have suffered here such that this particular Devil’s Bargain is a price they’ll happily pay.”

The mage looked stricken. It was worse than she thought. It wasn’t just that there was… _something_ …in this town, but that the residents all knew it. More so, they accepted it and spoke openly about it. Subjugated to the reign of one tyrant for the promise that they wouldn’t be subjugated to another. And that meant that hunting this thing would likely be complicated by the protection offered to it by the people of the village. The Speakers had encountered such villages before; demoralized, corrupt, places…and they were terrifying.

Father Creţu seemed almost gleeful at her disdain. “Oh, don’t be so put out, my lovely. No one here is in misery. Well, not entirely anyway. In fact, quite a few of our townsfolk even came here specifically for this reason! Lost their families and homes to the night creatures, or maybe just a few limbs, and settled here for safer, greener pastures.”

“Watered with blood.” Trevor muttered. But at least the man was honest.

Alucard, however, was distant. He was remembering his dream. The insects and grubs squirming beneath the overturned rock but only skittering about to escape when the painful light of day was forced upon them. Rushing about to return, as quickly as possible, to the cold, dank, underground and to the comfort of unrelenting darkness. Then the voice had come, and the thing in the well. Now, he couldn’t help but see the child in his nightmare as himself and Trevor and Sypha; grasping onto the edges of an ancient fieldstone and threatening everything beneath it that they would soon be throwing their shelter blithely into the grass. They needed to be careful; this priest, this entire town, could turn on them.

“This creature.” The dhampir spoke up suddenly. “What do you call it?”

Creţu snorted and demanded his mug be refilled, to which the attendant brewmaster complied without a word. “You think that’s going to help you? Knowing his name?”

“I hardly think it is wise to hunt something when I do not know what it is.” Alucard answered.

“Knowing his name won’t tell you what he is.” The priest shot back.

“All the same. I would know it anyway.”

The priest seemed no more convinced of their capabilities now than he had at the start but shrugged indifferently. He then evaded the question.

“There’s an inscription in the church.” He said. “It’s on a capstone by the pedestal. Written in old Coptic.” He laughed derisively. “Probably here two hundred years before the town was. Fools built the entire church right over it thinking it was some kind of divine sign of sanctuary. When the diocese sent me here, I couriered a rubbing of it to an old friend of mine in Târgoviște for translation. Turns out it’s a pretty little poem most certainly appropriate for a nave.”

“Why do I doubt that?” Trevor replied.

Father Creţu cleared his throat and began to recite. 

"In Earth’s broad temple, now you stand.  
And not the ships that brought us.  
We carve this message in the land,  
Lines deep like our Mother taught us.  
Here now never to betray,  
With golden script or gilded fetters,  
What soil and half-turned leaves display,  
A memorial in crimson letters.”

A silence followed. 

But Trevor broke it.

“Is…that it?”

“That’s all that remains of it.” The priest waved his hand impassively before downing several more mouthfuls of ale. “We were able to date it to sometime around the first or second Crusade, which is odd. Didn’t think the Humiliati or even the Hospitallers passed through this region but, I suppose, maybe they did. The Inquisition, of course, thinks the whole church ought to be razed. For…devilry. Or something. Last Inquisitor that tried though went completely mad. Started screaming and spitting like a rabid dog. Going on about _conversos_. You know, the Jews they say pretend to be Christians to get out of their due punishment? Anyway, he’s dead now too.”

“Conversos?” Sypha queried. “The Tribe of Abraham hasn’t been through the backroads of Wallachia since they parted with the Roma. In the cities, maybe, but out here?”

“Of course.” Father Creţu quipped. “At least half a dozen of their enclaves arrived here before the end of the millennium. Many still live all over the upper hills. He doesn’t bother them though. He’s one of them.”

Alucard cocked his head. “The creature that haunts you is…Jewish?”

“Israelite.” The priest corrected. “At least, that’s my going theory. The very old rabbis still recite their books and poetry to him, bury their old manuscripts in the ground for him, or the ashes of them. One of them even told me once that they could hear him speaking in their old language sometimes. But you know what I think?”

Trevor sighed. “No.”

“I think he led them here. Like the Exodus, you know? Out of Egypt.”

The dhampir tensed. “What did you say?”

“Egypt. You know, the Black Kingdom of the Old Testaments.”

Sypha gently laid a concerned hand onto Alucard’s arm. “What is it, Adrian? What’s worrying you?”

“The words we heard…on the wind. Yesterday, when I said that they sounded familiar but I couldn’t make them out?”

“Yes?”

“Coptic, Israelite, Egypt…it makes sense now. It was speaking in some form of Hieratic or Amharic.”

“What …even is that?” Trevor interrupted.

“Amharic?” Alucard smiled, despite the fact that he was certain he would pay for his bit of ego later. It still amused him to make the hunter acutely aware of the disparities in their intellects. “It’s one of the ancient Semitic languages of northern Africa. My mother used to keep all kinds of medical texts curated from the time of the New Kingdom and from Ancient Greece and Rome. So if, indeed, we are talking about an elder of Antiquity, one who has come here to rest and escape, we could be talking about a Patriarch. It must have come with the first of the Hebrews to arrive here. That would explain why it was never at court and why it has remained so bound to the land around its people.”

Creţu glared at the three of them. “You all are really serious about this, aren’t you? You think you’re going to come in here, stir up trouble, and then…what? You’ll get no help from this town. They don’t want you, or anyone like you, to disturb their “peace.” And plenty have come before you, including holy fathers and witch hunters of all kinds. They cross the northern boundaries, they go gallivanting around the mountains, and then they die and we’re left to clean up the mess. Leave this be. It’s not for you.”

Trevor clapped his mug onto the wagon ledge. “Yeah, that’s great. Tell us how to find him anyway.”

“And if I don’t?”

The hunter sniffed, wiped his mouth, and leaned forward. “Well, if you don’t, then I’m going to head over to your church and stir up so much trouble, as you put it, that _he_ won’t have any other choice but to come down here _himself_ and deal with me. So, the way I see it, you can tell us what we want you to and we’ll head off and get ourselves duly killed and you won’t have to worry about it or, you can be an obstinate shithead and I’ll make sure that it gets us all killed. Maybe even set your ugly church on fire. Which would you prefer?”

Alucard chuckled. “He’ll do it, too.”

The priest frowned and looked over the hunter a little more carefully. “The crest…on your tunic. Do I know that from somewhere?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Hm. Fine. As you wish. But don’t expect a pleasant funeral. The church plots are already taken up so anything leftover just gets dropped into the catacombs.”

“Ok by me.” Trevor leaned back again and started on his generously offered third mug.

“Alright then.” Father Creţu said snidely. “Your glorious end will come when you take the northern footpath through the gate and follow it until you reach the base of the first outcropping. There’s a fence marker there; you can’t miss it. That’s the point of no return. Cross over it and you accept your fate. Just above the cliff face, you’ll see an old watchtower built into the rock. That’s where you’re going.”

“You know.” The hunter noted. “You still didn’t answer my companion’s question and that also annoys me. What do you call this thing?”

The priest looked at Trevor askance. 

“Gamaliel.”


	9. Fear Itself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (I consider this my good deed for the day. - Nas)

**Fear Itself**

If there was ever something that needed to be said, it needed to be said about the Broad Lane Inn because never had there been a more nondescript traveler’s lodge than this tavern. Where their last respite had been the veritable apotheosis of bad taste, with its damask and vile coloration, this one was so banal that it only served to remind Alucard why he found traveling to be so annoyingly repetitive. No sooner had they left a village than he ceased to be able to conjure a clearly detailed memory of it and in looking back on the events of the last few weeks, he almost never remembered the specifics of rooms or meals. Such mundanities just ceased to exist in the stories told about it all later. And now, looking about the main hall of the three-story inn, he could see why.

If ‘brown’ could be described as a mood, this was such a mood. Dust-caked wanderers balancing wooden spoons on the edges of clay cups, twirling knives, or tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads reached the wall where the innkeeper had pasted gratuitous advertisements for rums and whiskeys and other amber drinks. It was a place firmly in the hands of wholesale professional dealers in misfortune; rogues, undertakers, and jailers of the kind who might not steal your purse, but who would certainly steal the individual life you were living in order to wedge it into the rhythmic machinations of their horrible designs. Wretches at the height of their misery; a category of humanity stretching all the way back to Cain. Brown was, therefore, the provenance of the cankered over-civilization that produced both aristocrats and peasants; borderers and adventurers of semi-barbarism reduced to their core element. Dirt.

Trevor had taken a table at the far corner and Alucard now sat across from him as he carefully retied the tan leather strapping about the handle of his whip. An hour more at the trading post had hardly been revelatory. The interior records office had been dotted with paintings of horses, called Revenge, Prospect, and Plenipotentiary; all of which marked a time when the village had flourished back in the years of fourteen hundred and ever-so-few. Aside from Father Creţu though, no one else had been forthcoming with any additional information about the odd state of the town and its people or about the thing harbored below now called Gamaliel. Which was why Sypha had elected to remain at the archives awhile longer; or, at least, until she could find something of use to them in the coming conflict.

“You mentioned something about a Patriarch back there.” Trevor interrupted the dhampir’s distant thoughtfulness and pensive observation of the whip handle. “What did you mean?”

Alucard glanced up; reading what he could in the hunter’s relaxed posture and coming up with nothing. Trevor at rest was about as harmless as a basking cobra, if less predictable.

“The Eight Progenitors of the Elder Ones. Surely your family’s legends talk of them?” He replied. 

“More like the family bestiary, but sure.” Trevor smiled, cracking a bit of leather over his fingers as he re-knotted the barrel hitch at the pommel. “But it’s not like it says much. Vampires that old were rare even back then and the named ones were pretty much treated more like myths than reality.”

“They’re frightfully territorial but they do exist.” Alucard acknowledged. “They were most often attached to a specific group of people though, which probably explains why this one has come all the way here.”

“I’m kinda surprised about that actually. Isn’t Dracula technically one of them? Wouldn’t he have chased it off?”

Alucard sighed. “No, my father is not _that_ old. Nor does he feel any particular loyalty to one nationality. The connection to the land is arguable though. I think it is more likely that he simply had no quarrel with this one and didn’t see a point in committing the energy and forces it would take him in attempting to unseat it.”

“Forces.” Trevor grumbled. “And here we are, the three of us, proposing to take it on by ourselves. I’m starting to think we should just leave poor old Nicăieri here to take care of itself. No one seems all that upset about living on the back of an elder vampire who’s slowly sucking them dry. Right out from under their feet, even.”

Trevor was right to be cynical and Alucard couldn’t fault him for it; at least, not outwardly. The hospitality of the village was passing enough even if kindness and courtesy were only fragile masks that made life appear beautiful and not the genuine expressions of a contented principality. In its dark hunger, Nicăieri welcomed everyone worthy of welcome: from pale clergymen coming to breath the pastoral air with its medicinal calamint and lilac to great statesmen retired from the affairs of empire and ready to tell stories of their glory days to eager grandchildren on the farmstead porch. Could they; hunter, dhampir, and mage, promise the townsfolk a better life than this once the work was done and the Elder One vanquished? Or was it as Father Creţu had said and it was better to leave the nightmarish fieldstone unturned.

“Perhaps you’re right.” Alucard coldly mused. “What horrors would we be dooming them to in his absence? Another Plague perhaps? Increasing attacks by the spawn of Hell? Demonic possession?”

“You don’t sound very convinced of all that.” The hunter rejoined.

“I have a difficult time with docile servility to callous masters.”

Trevor burst out laughing; full and openly, nearly choking himself on his own humorous gasps.

“Something funny, Belmont?” Alucard snapped in return.

“Yes.” The hunter answered, wiping at the tears now trickling onto his cheeks. “You.”

The dhampir scowled. “I fail to see the jest.”

“Irony.” Trevor corrected, calming himself enough to lower his tone. “Here we are, sitting face to face, in a town that’s been defeated utterly by a creature they now call sovereign because they _want_ to be overcome. They _want_ to be enslaved. They’ll take _his_ control over the fear of what else awaits them any day.”

The hunter leaned forward, dropping his voice to a hush. “Just. Like. You.”

Alucard was quiet for several moments; glaring across the closing spaces between them with a threatening golden gaze. “ _You_ are not my sovereign.” He finally replied.

Trevor slowly began to wrap the base of the whip still in his hand around his forearm. “Oh?” He said. “Would you like to test that theory? Dhampir.”

Alucard drew in a slow but unsteady breath. The leather in the hunter’s hand creaked as it tightened and he could almost feel it cinching around him, confining him, pinching his skin between its braided threads as the hunter subdued him. “Such depravity, Belmont.”

“Hn.” The hunter chuckled. “Yeah, and this time, Sypha’s not going to be here to save you for at least a few more hours.”

The dhampir briefly look around them. “We are in public, in the company of lawmen and mercenaries. I hardly think you could be proposing to have your way with me in the middle of the dining hall. Or are you that base, Belmont, and thinking you’ll just throw me over this table and have done with it?” 

“Now that’s a thought.” Trevor smiled, still reclining in his wooden chair. “But unfortunately, I don’t think Sypha is carrying enough money to bail the both of us out of jail right now. On the other hand, what makes you think I won’t order you to stand up right now, walk up those stairs, and get on your knees?”

Alucard sniffed with an intentionally haughty air, tipping his chin up to frown at the hunter disapprovingly. “I’ve sated you well enough is what I think.”

“I see. And is that why you’ve purposely been ignoring me all day?”

“I haven’t…” The dhampir rounded coarsely, before reminding himself of his manners and reducing his volume. “I haven’t been ignoring you. I was merely engaged in thought.”

“Uh huh. All damn day. Fine. What were you all so caught up in then? Launching a hunt for the monster ruling a town from the sewers? It’s really not that hard, Adrian. We find it, it finds us, we put it to bed.”

“No. I was…thinking about last night. It was a dangerous thing you did, Belmont. You could have been hurt. Sypha killed. My senses are not always so…disciplined. My decision to remain apart from humanity all those years ago was the right one. I will not do it again.”

“Won’t do what again?” Trevor narrowed his eyes and flicked the end of the whip with his index finger. 

“I don’t think I have to answer that.”

The two entwined lashes of the whip cracked suddenly, startling the dhampir and nearly causing him to leap backwards. Before doing so, however, he darted a look towards the hunter; just in time to see him unspooling the weapon from his arm and into a coil around his hand.

“Get up.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, you’ll be taking the ends of this to the backside of your head. Standing means better direction at center mass.”

“Mean to whip me then, do you?” Alucard snarled. “That didn’t work out so successively well for you the last time you tried it at Gresit.”

“If I wanted to fight you, Adrian, I wouldn’t be telling you to get up.”

Dhampir and hunter stared at one another hard. If mankind truly was just the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in the tiny open boats of humanity making one more desperate attempt to reach the shore – as so many grave church philosophers maintained – then these two had found themselves unwillingly sharing the bottom of a capsized raft at the onset of a tempest. If, in plain English, men were no more than the ghosts of dead devils who had “died into life” and walked the Earth in suits of living rags which could last three or four score summers and no more, then there were no sweet spirits in anyone’s company here.

Trevor casually stood up from his chair. “You can play the blushing virgin if you want but it’s going to be a lot easier for you if you do what I tell you to.”

“I told you that I will not do that again.”

“Yeah, I heard you. And don’t worry. You’re right, you won’t.”

The dhampir shivered. Alucard could not deny that he found most people’s interest in him prurient, or at best superficial, but on the rare occasion that he truly experienced disgust with the attentions of others it was usually due to the fact that the man shared the same such peculiarities of his own temperament that he could not help but be simultaneously seized by both pity and yearning. Better Trevor had been born a simpler man, because then at least he could have loved his soul kindly and with a certain tenderness which none need waste on a noble nature. Rather, this hunter was endowed with such congenital incapacity for charm that nothing could make a gentleman of him; not entitlement, not wrath, not the profoundest sympathy. But unlike so many other aristocrats who carefully weeded their inner circles of such unfortunates, Alucard found that he had a taste for them. In which case, no matter what Trevor said, the dhampir could not bring himself to abandon what he desired most.

As if facing an especially unruly snake, Alucard slowly got to his feet. And no sooner had he than the whip slithered out from Trevor’s exceedingly dexterous hands and wrapped around the dhampir’s wrist, then looping over his forearm to his elbow. Reflexively, Alucard grabbed onto the leading part of the fall hitch and yanked the weapon taut. Both the thong and fall were tight around his arm but Trevor would have no choice but to approach him if he wanted to retrieve it for a second blow. The hunter didn’t appear to intend to, however.

“Now.” Trevor replied quietly, noting that their lightning-fast exchange had, thus far, gone unnoticed in the larger tavern rooms. “You can behave yourself and follow me up those stairs or you can make a scene and I can leash you, hissing and spitting, with the rest of this whip and drag you up.”

It was all Alucard could do not to sneer at him, but he had the sincere feeling that would only earn him a retaliatory strike. “Is this your idea of seduction, Belmont?”

It was a cheap insult but it was also the only one that had come to him on short notice. In response, however, Trevor simply began to roll his opposite hand into the length of cord binding them together; pulling the reluctant dhampir closer and into the cover of early evening shadows. When they were finally nose to nose, the hunter curled his fingers into the whip coils around Alucard’s arm and hauled him up. When his back was to the wall, Trevor pressed into him until he could set his mouth against the dhampir’s ear.

“You need a little more persuasion? Alright.” 

The whisper was sultry and hot, and nothing at all like Trevor’s normal demeanor. It caught Alucard so completely off guard that he barely reacted when the hunter’s mouth closed over his in a deeply sensual kiss. In fact, he couldn’t remember if Trevor had ever kissed him again after their discussion in the bath house just two days prior – an eternity ago – but it was like being wrapped in that steam and heady euphoria all over again. The hunter commanded him fully, sinking his tongue into the depths of the dhampir’s mouth with exploratory bliss. Coaxing him to do the same and then teasing along the length of his fangs when he did. But the kiss broke prematurely and Alucard nearly followed Trevor’s movement as surely as he was still being tugged along by the leather rope he held on to. It did not go unnoticed and the hunter chuckled.

“More?”

The reply was flushed and soft. “Yes.”

Trevor crashed into him again, this time capturing his mouth and securing his body against the wall with one hand hooked around the dhampir’s thigh. The kiss was almost frenzied; a brutal caress stolen out from under the notice of at least twelve other people. When Trevor pulled back again, Alucard very nearly whined in frustration but the hand that came up to his neck held him still. It was then, with a merciless smile, that Trevor leaned forward for a third time, setting his thumb beneath the dhampir’s throat so that he would tip his head up slightly.

He closed for a slower, gentler, kiss; though Alucard vaguely wondered why the hunter would feel the need to control him so carefully for such sweet contact. Surely there was nothing to fear from a mild touch. But with blinding speed, he then felt something catch at the very tip of one of his fangs, and it pierced down almost instantly. Alucard would have cried out if his mouth had not suddenly been full of both the hunter’s bleeding tongue and his blood, but as it stood, he began to scrabble plaintively at the wood planks behind him as his appetite surged. It was a terrifying rush.

His face felt like fire and his skin prickled; that he should immediately die of shock and rage if not for the life that poured into him. Alucard had not truly tasted human blood for such a long time. Sips, drams perhaps, here and there, but not the full-bodied intoxicant that he now drank down greedily. Roses bloomed in his cheeks and he suckled more fervently at the hunter’s mouth, wrenching at the whip still restraining one of his hands as the other tangled into Trevor’s dark brown hair. His lover continued to kiss him throughout it all, even letting him draw a little more from the wound before the font naturally ceased to flow.

With a sigh, the hunter finally released him but kept his quarry still securely pinned to the wall. He seemed to take in his appearance with a disconcertingly calm expression; his gaze drifting down from the reddened eyes and clenched fangs to the flutter of pained breaths in the dhampir’s chest. With two fingers extended, Trevor then reached up to wipe a stray droplet of blood from Alucard’s lower lip before feeding it back to him by pulling his mouth open and pressing it to his tongue. This time, the dhampir was able to suppress the moan that would have resulted and simply maintained terse eye contact with the hunter as he carefully cleaned the digit of its succulent gifts.

“Let me guess.” Trevor murmured, watching his companion tease at his fingers with intense interest. “You still want more.”

“I…” The reply began. “I shouldn’t.”

“But you do.”

“Trevor, please. This can only end in injury.”

The hunter smiled. Whenever Alucard used his given name it was always in a distinctly vulnerable position. Whether begging for more or begging for release, he was only ever ‘Trevor’ when the dhampir was at his breaking point. It was a sign he rather triumphantly now read in Alucard’s otherwise impenetrable linguistic formalities. 

“Then let me tell you how this is going to go.” The hunter whispered against the other’s mouth. “You’re going to follow me upstairs, to the first room on the left. Then, you’re going to undress for me, and when you’ve done that to my satisfaction, you’re going to lay down on the bed and wait for me. No matter what you hear or what you feel, you’ll stay down. Do you understand? And if you can do that, I’ll give you another kiss, just like that one. If you’re exceptionally good about it, I might even let you bite me. Just a little.”

“Trevor, you…you can’t do that. You cannot tempt me to this.”

“One day, Adrian, you’re going to thank me for this. Not today, of course, and probably not any time in the near future but before I’m buried, I’m going to show you what real control is and there will never be a day when you won’t remember who had you first. No matter who comes to you after this, you will remember my touch as if this day never ended.”

The dhampir shuddered, his breath coming in short, excited, pants. “What are you doing to me?”

“I’m provoking you.” He laughed. “Question is, are you going to let me win or are you going to keep fighting me?”

“I…” Alucard didn’t get to finish the thought.

“Because I sincerely hope you resist. Confront me. Argue. Lash out. Do whatever it is you think is going to protect you. And then, when you’re done; when you’re ready to give up, you’ll see that I was right all along. The vampire in your soul _can_ be controlled. Just not by you.”

For a moment, the dhampir was speechless, staring into Trevor’s determined eyes as he pulled Alucard in for another brief kiss. He struggled to apprehend the hunter’s meaning, but at the same time, his words touched at something deep within the darkest, most savage, parts of him. What if what he said was literally true? What if the only thing that could truly subdue the vampire, the monster that consumed him from within…was a hunter? His hunter. Trading life for death every moment of every day.

Trevor Belmont parted from him then and stepped back. 

“Now.” He said, his voice sinister and filled with foreboding. “Get the fuck up there and be ready for me. Because right now? You’re going to be mine.”


	10. Vinculum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Whew)

**Vinculum**

Trevor Belmont had been ten years old when he met his first wild horse. The stone-hoofed beast, recently captured, was subjected to the distinguished art of taming in the presence of his father, Gabriel. A severe man, but one who knew the benefits of testing one’s wits against Nature from a young age. The animal was led in by two stout farmhands, closely confined by straps and a double bridle to prevent any sudden, dangerous, tricks of shoulder-biting or foot-striking. The beast’s countenance, however, expressed the utmost degree of ferocity and cunning. He was a lovely blue-roan yearling with quivering flanks and a sweat-stained back, and no intention whatsoever of being domesticated.

The child before him was clever, though. He took a handful of budding lilac leaves and lemon grass, and crushing them between his palms so as to bring out their peculiar fragrance, fastened them to the end of a pole and held them out towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant, -- it drew in their scent eagerly and attempted to seize them in its mouth. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject for the moment, the boy proceeded to tie a bundle of blue lucerne to the end of the pole and return it to the horse. The effect was near magical. Its eyes filled as if with raindrops and its lips trembled as it pressed them to the flowers. After that, it was perfectly tempered, without showing him the least disposition to kick out with the feet or hit from the shoulder. It was the day his first colt’s training had truly begun with nothing more than a switch and a handful of meadow grass. It had also been an age since then but even now, Trevor still occasionally missed that horse.

“We’ve come to face a buried evil and _this_ is what you wish to engage in right now, Belmont?”

Ah, he was ‘Belmont’ again. Alucard was trying to regain his footing.

“Let me tell you why, Adrian.”

The air fluttered around the dhampir, cool and a little moist, smelling disturbingly – hauntingly -- like the hunter. Alucard blinked in the darkness of the room. His eyes were quickly adjusting but there was not much to see in the eerie gloom of blackout curtains and a tin-tiled ceiling. He felt vulnerable and a little afraid, despite the fact that he had, thus far, been obedient to Trevor’s demands. They had come into the room together, still tentatively kissing and testing one another. Alucard had then undressed; slowly, without touch or contact from the hunter, as he was instructed. It was a little unnerving to be watched so intently like the hunter had but he offered no correction. The dhampir then lay down, on his back, in the middle of the bed; where he could no longer see what Trevor was doing. He could only hear him.

“My father used to say that the most dangerous horses in the world were the old ones without any scars on their loins. Because those were the ones who’d never be tamed.”

Alucard scowled; everywhere else silent but for the soft clatter of glass on glass somewhere in the room.

“And before you get all cross that I’m comparing you to livestock,” Trevor continued. “I’ll remind you that it was _you_ who first referred to your bloodline as a savage one. To the vampire inside you as a feral thing. So, the fact of the matter is, if I am ever to trust you…to fight alongside you…I have to know that I won’t ever be fighting against you.”

The dhampir felt the candid admission in the hunter’s words acutely. His vampiric nature was dangerous; to all three of them. He knew that. It would need to be controlled before the calamity made the worst out of him. Mastered. And he was not yet equal to it. 

But Trevor was.

“What will you do?” Alucard asked softly. 

“Claim you.” The voice came back, cool and distant, yet close enough to make his body shiver in response. “Challenge it, for ownership of you.”

“You speak of it as though it were a demon possessing me….and not simply myself.” He said, still quietly. In the background--or was that the foreground? -- the sound of a chain clinked, filling him with curiosity and resignation all at once. “You talk as if I were your slave.” 

“We’re all slaves to something, Adrian.” The voice chided him gently, terrifyingly soothing to him as it drew nearer. Chains clinked again, and their solid cold succession then stole over the coolness of his body. The dhampir squeezed his eyes shut to block out the dim silhouette carefully binding his wrists, which then progressed across his chest, until the links circled loosely around his neck. Once finished, Alucard did not need to pull experimentally at his bonds to know that they were fastened over his head. 

The metal felt strange against his skin, however. Though supple and draped, it was as though he were pressed against bars. He could stretch and curl but only as much as a cage might have allowed and no matter how perturbed the creature that dwelt within him became, it was no more threatening than an imprisoned panther at a carnival attraction. It could lie down and lap at its sides or stir itself into a rage, showing white teeth and a mad howl, but to those on the outside, it was harmless. 

“Do you know what a Catena is?” Trevor queried from somewhere above him.

He did, of course. Such darkly consecrated chains were commonplace in the true vampire hunter’s arsenal. Fashioned by generations of theologian-witches and occultist will-workers, they were said to represent the line of sacred texts going all the way back to Moses and the first Apostles; the connected series of prophecies and gospels that bound all of the Abrahamic faiths together and gave them the strength to hold back the forces of Hell. Each Catena was unique to the lineage that made it. Some were used as the chain to form a morning star or a flail, others were hung in dungeons with manacles at their ends. This one too had clearly known the soulless and the supernatural before. He was surprised, however, that it didn’t hurt. It held him, utterly, but not harshly.

When the dhampir didn’t answer him, Trevor took his quiet acquiescence for understanding. “Good. Then you know the rules. Accept your bonds and you won’t feel any pain. Fight them, and this chain will cut your flesh like holy fire. The further you submit, the lesser it will hold you.”

“And if I demand that you free me?”

Trevor chuckled lowly. “Well, that will depend on who I’m talking to.”

The hand that brazenly slid down his torso was hot and teasing but Alucard had kept his eyes closed; allowing the caress without comment. It was Trevor’s only kind of benediction; less the tallow candles melting away in the church confessional and more a petition at the feet of St. Secaire himself.

“You’re so smooth.” The hunter commented aside; pausing to run his fingers over his captive’s ribs and belly. “You feel like silk wrapped around marble. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can also feel you breathing, I’d say this wouldn’t be all that different than tying up a statue.”

“I can feel _you_.” The dhampir huffed.

Trevor smiled but Alucard didn’t see it. What he’d meant, of course, was that a statue would be insensate to the touch but the hunter amused himself with also imagining that the other man was referring to something _far_ more intimate. 

“Open your eyes, Adrian. Look at me.”

Alucard did as he was told; looking up at Trevor with as much of an indifferent expression as he could muster for the moment. Somewhere in the interim, the hunter had also shed his clothes and was now kneeling at the edge of the bed nearest to the dhampir’s hip. 

"This is the worst, isn't it?" The chain jingled as Trevor stroked the cool metal over Alucard’s neck and across his chest. "Submission of your body is easy. I’m betting you’d let me take you again without much fuss really. Fuck you hard again. That doesn’t bother you, does it? But it’s only on the surface. Pride, humiliation, honor, need, you lock it all away inside yourself so that the monster can feed on it." The dhampir turned his head away. “Time we did something about that.”

A low chuckle and another caress, to the inside of his thigh, made him turn his head back. 

“Should I show you what I mean?" Trevor queried.

The fingers lingered, teasingly; giving light brushes to his skin and making him tremble. Alucard was still so unaccustomed to such a sensual touch that he was almost embarrassed at his response to something so perfunctory. But the hunter pressed his palm to his lover’s abdomen and then around the base of his organ; running his thumb up along his shaft before closing his hand and providing a few firm strokes before returning to Alucard’s thigh. Over and over he did this, until the dhampir was arching upward, hissing softly with arousal. 

"Trevor, please." He licked his lips, his voice tinged with a sob.

His hunter’s mouth suddenly covered his own and Alucard moaned into the kiss. But the other man pulled away too soon and kept his lips just out of the dhampir’s reach. If he wanted to follow, he would have to pull at his bonds. That would mean not only the immediate pain of the Catena but also the frustration of being denied more of the Belmont’s taste and heat. When Trevor let go of him and then produced a small knife from the folds of the bedclothes, the dhampir narrowed his eyes and growled in warning.

But the blade was not meant for him; not directly at least, and when the hunter placed the flat of it against his own wrist, Alucard stared back at him in horror. Surely Trevor did not mean to do what he was thinking he meant to do.

“Trevor…don’t…”

The hunter was right. Submission of his body was easy; like sparring or training for war. Like yielding in contest. Alucard could also endure most physical trials without overt distress. But this was the submission of his of very being and there would be a price to extract that he could hardly bear to consider. Let the Belmont lock his body in place, beat him even if it would please the man; he could heal from any of it, but to provoke him into bloodlust and deny him until he’d won _the vampire’s_ deference was a far deadlier game.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t tempt me like that. You already have me. I’m tied, I can’t fight you. So just …fuck me.”

“Bargaining already?” That amused voice again. Like spun sugar; sweet and airy. Warm breath eased back into the dhampir’s senses when Trevor leaned forward to lick a path over his jaw and chin, then across his lips before biting down on the lower one. When Alucard moaned softly in response, the hunter nipped him again a little harder, then laved his tongue at the small hurt. 

"Negotiate all you want, but…" Soft bite, hard sucking kiss on top of it, right over the throbbing vein on the side of Alucard’s throat. "…after this, the only one who will truly satisfy you, is me." The words were pressed so far into his skin that the dhampir was sure he'd heard wrong but the harder bite to the side of his neck, just below his ear, made his body ache and tense almost as much as hearing Trevor speak to him with such private whispers. 

He moaned plaintively, shuddering when Trevor kissed down his chest, tongue dipping into the hollow well of his navel. Alucard’s chains rattled as he strained upward; wanting more of the caresses, wanting them to stop; uncertain of what he should ask for. Sanity, salvation, his soul, …something…

Trevor finally sat back and the dhampir’s skin seemed to prickle wherever those impassive pale eyes passed. He shifted against the negligible weight of the chains. The bondage they represented was far weightier than the Catena itself but thus far, Alucard had not attempted to break free or really even to loosen his bonds; in secret or otherwise. 

“Now.” The hunter stated with an appreciative tone. “Let us see to your first lesson then, shall we?” 

Alucard flushed. He’d never been a proper schoolboy but he certainly felt like one now. When Trevor settled back and then slid down his body with a slow, feline, crawl, it took him several moments to gauge his intent. When the hunter then immediately took his erection into his mouth and began to suck, the dhampir fell back onto the blanket with a deeply pleasured moan; bucking his hips instinctively as the hunter’s throat relaxed around his length.

What he then didn’t see were the pale eyes now shadowed, narrowed, watching him closely. The predator waiting in ambush. For the dhampir, this had to be some sort of dream; some return to the depths of sleep where such bliss was only possible. Nowhere else could Trevor’s eyes glitter so intensely; nowhere else could a halfling’s heart pound the way it was, or his chest ache as it did. The mouth continued to work him and the hunter’s hands were again stroking him everywhere: his belly, his thighs; pressing them wider, before scratching down his sides and steadying his hips.

The chains tinkled like laughter and chimed when he moved, making his face burn hotter, keeping pace with the arousal and need thrumming through him.

"Please" Supplication fell from his lips as Trevor moved faster. He was beyond being teased now, needing the harder pressure on his rigid sex. But somewhere in his mind, Alucard knew that this was only the beginning; this indulgence was meant to excite him into humiliation, to stoke his lusts so that whatever it was that Trevor demanded of him next would be accepted, no matter the cost. 

"Please, Trevor!" He gritted his teeth as a wave of arousal crested through him.

To his surprise, a slickened finger entered him and curled.

"Ohhgod." The dhampir arched again, spreading his thighs without command, offering himself up to the man pleasuring him. Desire was coiling hard and tight in his belly, the heat of it like a pool dragging him down into molten earth. He ached all the way to his toes with the need to give in to the seduction that was engulfing him; the control that was wrapped around him, taking and giving in equally. Perhaps Trevor really did only mean to have him one more time; perhaps his threats had been only that. A performance of his domination that the dhampir had readily played into.

"Yes! Take it, please!" Alucard bit his lip on the sob that wanted out of him, and eagerly arched upwards to feed more of his arousal into that proficient mouth. "Take me, all of me." 

He was almost there.

But then Trevor was there, over him, wrapping a hand into the chains around his neck just as he was ready to spend. The dhampir wailed indignantly and thrashed without thinking. The Catena instantly bit into his arms, tearing a gasp from the captive man tinged with blood. The fetters tightened. He could feel them; he could taste them. And then the hunter’s hands on his skin, in his hair; Trevor’s tongue in his mouth and tracing over his lips. He opened for him, tasting tears in the salt and viscidity. 

And then the man was inside of him. Pressing hard until he breached the tight dhampir with an animal thrust. Alucard screamed; loud in the stillness of the room. He had expected to be taken but he did not yet quite know what to do with the forcible power the hunter used to fully penetrate him. Following that, there was no pause for him to gather himself as Trevor ripped the chain taut and began to fuck him absolutely senseless. Their mingled breathing was harsh and discordant as the hunter moved; riding his hostile yearling with a shout of unrepentant vigor. Trevor had taken him hard before, but there was no restraint in the thrusts that shook the dhampir nearly out of his skin. It was all Alucard could do not to cry out desperately. Not to fight him with every ounce of outrage.

“Fuck yes.” He heard the hunter moan. He could feel Trevor’s hips meet him each time he violently reseated himself, could feel him thrusting deep as he leaned forward on his knees to gain better leverage over the dhampir’s prone body. Alucard struggled against the Catena; unsure as to whether or not the magical chain could discern the difference between his personal resistance and the undulating movements caused by the man pounding into him. Either way, it stayed him with sharp counterpoints of grinding pain to the pleasure dragging him along the rough road to oblivion. Then, there came a slap to the side of his face. 

Alucard snarled. It hadn’t been a particularly hard blow; barely enough for him to feel it but enough of a sting to get his attention. He glared up at the man on top of him; briefly treated, as was their current position, to a view of the hunter’s hard body rhythmically gliding between his thighs. Trevor grabbed his chin, forcing him to tilt his head back and meet his eyes.

“Let me see it.” He demanded in a low, looming, tone. “Let me fucking see it.”

The dhampir tried to twist out of his grip, to throw his head to the side, but he was trapped; by chain, by need, by the hunter’s body pinning him, by the hand now wrapping around his throat…and by the fiend that dwelt at his core. His eyes went red and he could feel the specter of his nature lashing out at the injustices that this ignoble cretin was subjecting him to. The vampire wanted none of this and certainly none of a peasant vampire hunter’s arrogant conquest. His fangs almost creaked against the bone of his upper jaw as they lengthened in response. But Trevor was relentless.

“That’s it. There you are, you bastard.” He growled. “Now, I want you to look at me. Watch _very_ carefully.”

Alucard could do nothing else. And as the hunter straightened and tempered his thrusts into a lengthened rhythm, he observed as the small knife once again appeared in Trevor’s hand. But this time, instead of teasing it at the base of his wrist, he raised the weapon to his left shoulder. A smattering of scars already existed there; hashed markings a testament to many such battles with hellspawn and the undead. And yet, the Belmont was hardly humbled by any of them. Instead, with a deft flick of his wrist, he opened a gash across the top of his left pectoral, just beneath his collarbone. To the dhampir’s shock, rivulets of blood immediately appeared; dripping down Trevor’s chest in fresh dark-red lines perfectly parallel to the old white wounds beneath them. He then dropped the knife and grabbed onto Alucard’s thighs to continue languidly fucking him as the dhampir nearly went mad beneath him.

The scent was overwhelming; like a savory feast at the fire for a wintery traveler. He was also already so near to release that the competing desires of his two appetites began to blend into one another. He wanted to drink, and to come, and to ravish the flesh so near to him until he had consumed all of its warmth and there was none more to give. A second slap rocked him and this time, the frantic dhampir snapped.

“Fuck you, Belmont! _Fuck you_! I won’t do it. I won’t beg you for it. Fuck me as hard as you want. Chain me to the floor for the night. Starve me. It won’t matter. I’ll outlast you. I’ll outlast all of you.”

That, as it turned out, was precisely what the hunter had been waiting for. 

With a triumphant grin, Trevor Belmont gave a series of thrusts hard enough to make the dhampir wince and whimper when they slowed. He then fell forward onto his arms, holding himself just a few inches above the infuriated creature below him and allowing the slow, syrupy, drips from the wound to fall onto Alucard’s face. The halfling sobbed angrily. It was there…just there…he could even catch them on his tongue…but only if he gave in to the chains…

“Oh, yes, fuck _me_.” He whispered into the wild tangle of Alucard’s hair. “You can resist me, Adrian. But renounce everything like a good believer and you’ll be given your fucking Sacrament.”

The hunter closed the distance between them completely and lay down onto the other; threading his fingers into the dhampir’s hair in order to press his mouth to the bleeding wound. He heard Alucard’s anguished cry as his mouth was filled and chuckled when he felt him fervently suckling at the gash; drawing as much nourishment from the shallow cut as he could. A second later, however, he also felt the strange convulsion that overtook the dhampir and almost laughed out loud as he realized that the odd physical stuttering was being caused by his lover reaching his peak while completely restrained. Alucard panted at the wound, licking and nursing obscenely; lax against his bonds as he came in heady, thick, streams between them. He even wrapped his legs around the hunter’s waist in an effort to keep him moving inside of him through each pulse of his orgasm.

“Good boy.” He heard the voice say from somewhere in the haze of his ecstasy. “That’s such a good boy. You’ve learned your first lesson so well. And you’re mine now, aren’t you?”

It wasn’t long after that Trevor came as well; thrusting with righteous abandon until the walls complained and he was bellowing out his pleasure to both Heaven and Hell. But Alucard lay perfectly still; the chains loose around his neck, the shackles slipping from his wrists. 

He didn’t even notice when the Catena fell to the floor.


	11. The Sackcloth Solution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Inching ever closer.)

**The Sackcloth Solution**

Gamaliel stirred at the sound of his name. He had sensed the interlopers’ presence since they had passed through the crossroads and over the threshold of his imminent domain several hours ago. Normally, such an arrival would have gone unnoticed and would hardly has caused him a moment’s concern. But these were no ordinary travelers; one a latent sorceress of unrealized power, another the last son of a Crusader’s illustrious lineage, and the third…well…he was none other than the heir of the Dragon himself.

Unbeknownst to all however, was just how much Gamaliel had come to know Alucard during his sleep in the crypts beneath Gresit. At first, he’d been surprised to find the dhampir so deep below ground, and as mortally wounded as he had been by his own father’s hand. While the halfling lay torpid, he had then come to him many times over the course of the ensuing year; as mist and smoke, as a phantom in his dreams, and later in a variety of physical forms such as he could manifest them. How he had loved to touch him; to ghost incorporeal finger tips over the delicate lines of his face, to smother him in shadows, or to lick at his wounds as the droplets of rain water that fell through the cracks in the ceiling. But Alucard had been unconscious of all of it, even when the elder lay next to him in the guise of a ghoul and sampled a little of the blood that seeped from his injury.

Gamaliel had long found it to be true that, before any vice could fasten itself on a man, body, mind, or moral nature, it must be debilitated and, as such, he found the dhampir to be especially procurable in his current state. Mosses and fungi gather, after all, only on sickly trees, not the thriving ones; and the odious parasites which fasten themselves upon the human frame tend to choose those which are already enfeebled. Indeed, whenever the wandering demons of sin and malfeasance were to find a ship adrift, so to speak – no steady wind at its sails, no thoughtful navigator directing its course – they would instantly step aboard, take the helm, and steer it straight into the maelstrom. This was why the Church so delighted in its narratives of purity; where healthy skin and whole flesh could be seen as evidence of Divine favor because no pestilence or corruption could stick to it and render it unclean. What, he then wondered, might they say of Adrian Țepeș? Whose flawless complexion and exquisite countenance belied not the good graces of God, but the infernal parentage of a hearth-witch and a vampire. 

Into the fray he must go then, as it were.

Dry, infertile, soil crumbled around him as the ancient Patriarch willed his limbs to move again for the first time in an eon. For more than two centuries he had supped on nothing but the fluids of the earth; sustaining his power through the blood offerings of farmers and herdsmen – be they in the form of animal sacrifice, in fields of succulent tubers and grains, or in the gift of the dead buried in the catacombs beneath the mountain. He was thus the true _vampyre_ in every sense that the peasantry meant it; slowly draining life from the world with each passing season. He had found himself a populace, already empty and ill-regulated, and had settled on them as Fate slothfully glossing the unending routines of their scratched-out living. From there he fanned them into deeper slumbers and idler dreams until they were little more than the walking dead themselves. But now he craved another taste of what had been on offer in the dhampir’s tomb.

The stones of the ruined wall gave way and crashed to the ground as a form emerged from a niche carved into the rock from long before the villages had been founded. Despite such a long respite, the body was not withered however. Lean and slender as vampires tended to be, but hardly ghastly; with pale, almost greyish, skin, hands tipped with black vulture’s claws, and a thick fall of golden-streaked auburn hair that swayed against the dust on the ground even when he was standing. The awakening elder then groaned and stretched, hearing his own bones sliding back into the better semblance of a man than the folded corpse that had only just inhabited its burial place moments ago. He stood on his feet, reset his spine, and arched stiff fingers over the letters chiseled out of the limestone that had once served as his headstone.

_yimakh shemo ve zikhro_

“May his name and his memory be erased.”

A devastating curse that had come from his own people to mark the presence of a most abhorrent enemy. A curse from the time of Haman, vizier in the Persian empire under King Ahasuerus, who persecuted the Tribes of Abraham with the guise of bringing them under the heel of royal authority. But the curse was not actually meant for him. Rather, he had appropriated the defiled resting place of a mad Templar, precursor to the Inquisition, and had taken great delight in sleeping on top of the decaying bones of a man who had burned Jewish men and women for the crime of nothing more than existing. But now, all that was left of the nameless Crusader was a pile of ash and a few scattered teeth. The rest of him was, undoubtedly, in Hell. 

Silver-flecked eyes narrowed in the gloom; reflecting just as much light as was needed to see the glimmer of his surroundings. It must be near nightfall for him to have woken at all but it was difficult to tell the time of day, or really even the time of year. He had no sense of summer or winter anymore and was barely cognizant of the years passing at all. First thing was first though, he should feed – properly – before anything else. No sense in going out to meet his erstwhile antagonists in such a state as this one and equally unwise to challenge the son of Dracula at anything other than his finest. He might only be a dhampir, but he was no traditional one and… he was not alone.

With silent steps undisturbing centuries of debris, Gamaliel passed from the dank underworld and into the diffused light of a rising moon. He relished the cool air for a moment, the sensation of actually seeing the world around him rather than perceiving it in clairvoyant distance, and taking note of the few changes that had been wrought into the world in his absence. A rock face cut away, a new field dug out on the horizon, the light of cottages interspersed in woods that had grown tall since last he’d walked through their barrows. And just out of sight, beyond the rise, the village of Nicăieri: a word that in its original meaning denoted “nothingness.” A void. An empty space, nullified and abandoned. 

He smiled at the bit of semantic irony. From Nothingness had he come, to Nothingness he would now return.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sypha sat on the chair next to the bed as Alucard slept. She fidgeted, for a variety of reasons, but the scowl had not left her face in as much time as she had been there. It wasn’t the relative activities of the dhampir and the hunter that concerned her but when she had spied the Catena discarded onto the floor, she could have hit Trevor upside the head for such a risky stunt. Catenas were known for being unpredictable, as magic weapons went, and there would be no guarantee that, even if used properly, it wouldn’t cause the dhampir unintended harm. The metaphor was also not lost on her and the sense that the dhampir’s tempering would come as assisted self-flagellation tested her sympathies. It was almost as if Trevor Belmont had simply produced a spiked cilice and threaded it through their collective necks. It had been her plan to help gentle Alucard but Trevor’s methods were much more clearly now meant to overcome him. As such, she’d immediately sent Trevor out of the room and on an errand to procure them new supplies while she tended to the dhampir.

There, of course, wasn’t a mark on him. But that’s what was so frustrating about dhampirs; they almost never showed outward evidence of their suffering. Save for the massive scar across his chest, of course, but that had a different story to tell. With an aggravated sigh, she rose and began to carefully inspect what of him she could see; which consisted of his upper torso and one leg. Everything else was wrapped in the sheets. 

She started at his face and neck; passive in sleep, to the gentle rise and fall of his breathing; slow, steady, and calm. His shoulders, then across the strong rise of his chest, to the liquid curves of his sides and hip. She even blushed a little at the memory of how he had felt to the touch; how wonderful it had been to dig her fingers into the softer parts of his back when they’d made love. That was until…well…

She straightened. 

Alucard was looking up at her with an unreadable expression. His golden eyes were still hooded with rest but he was clearly awake and seemed interested in whatever it was she was doing hovering over him and swaying back and forth indecisively. He didn’t move, however, and merely tilted his head questioningly.

“Hi.” She stated flatly.

“Something on your mind?” He replied.

“Yes. Well, I mean…” She trailed off and sat back down, her cheeks tinted with embarrassment. “I was making sure that you were all right. That’s all.”

“I’m perfectly fine.” The dhampir said. “No more worse for wear than I was before.”

Her eyes darted to the chain on the floor. “I didn’t know that Trevor had one of those. Or that he would…use it.”

Alucard actually chuckled at her wide-eyed indication. “Well, he made his point if nothing else.”

Sypha’s frown deepened. “Adrian, he wasn’t still punishing you for last night, was he? That wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was.”

“How can you say that? You didn’t know that…”

“Of course I knew, Syph.” He stopped her mid-sentence. “You don’t hunger like I do and not know something of what you’re capable of.”

She stared at him hard. He still seemed so oddly sedate, almost blasé in the way he continued to describe what had just transpired between himself and the Belmont hunter just hours before her return. “Trevor wasn’t…punishing me, as such. He was testing my control and showing me that my limits are far…less…than what I believed them to be.”

She motioned to the Catena. “And he used _that_ on you to do it?”

“Not my first choice, naturally.” Alucard admitted. “But effective.”

“Adrian, he could have seriously hurt you.”

“And I, you. Listen to me, Sypha. I appreciate your tenderness, I really do. And…I want to know it again. Just as much as I suspect you want to know me again. But before that is possible, I can’t be a danger to you. Trevor knows that better than the both of us, I think. But I have to know that I can control my instincts even when I lose myself. Right now, I can’t do that. I will kill you if you try me again. Which also means I can’t risk a repeat of last night.” He then followed her eyes down to the bindings with a thoughtful pause. “Or, I suppose if you’re feeling especially adventurous, you could use it yourself and see what comes of it.”

Her look of dismay was almost comical, with a sincere pout and a furrow to her brow that nearly brought the tip of her nose even with her cheekbones. “You mean I should…. should…with that thing…”

“Tie me up and take your pleasure, yes.”

She glowered down at him. “You really think I ought to do that? Chain you to the bed like some mad beast and have my own way with you like he did? Adrian!”

“Better than the mad beast ripping your throat out.”

Slowly, he observed as the self-assured mage deflated and slouched down into the hard-backed chair with a sour look. With a smirk, Alucard decided to bring the uncomfortable interaction to its inevitably awkward conclusion.

“Barring that.” He said. “You could always ask Trevor to do it and then supervise.”

All kinds of salacious mental images flashed through her mind. She really hadn’t known, or even suspected, that Alucard had such a vulgar streak, but here he was, still naked and a little roughed up from his most recent sexual encounter all the while filling her head with the most lewd and indecent things she would never have guessed would come from him. Trevor, sure. He was beyond hope. But Alucard? As a result, she suddenly imagined fastening the chain back around his neck and then riding him to mutual completion. She also briefly imagined doing so with Trevor’s backing; teasing and pleasuring them both from a between position. She did not, however, speak any of what she thought of out loud. Instead, she immediately changed the subject with a complete non sequitur.

“I found something interesting in the village’s records!” She spoke up brightly. “It was exactly as you thought but worse. Not only are there no children here but there hasn’t been a birth within the boundaries of the township for almost fifty years! Everyone who lives here emigrates from somewhere else. Like that old priest said.”

“Hmm.” Alucard replied, bringing one arm up to tuck it beneath his head and recline somewhat more comfortably. “I suppose that makes a degree of sense. Gamaliel is certainly a Vetus, as your Speakers call them. Though, the word I am more familiar with is Patriarch. Same thing either way. And as such, he’s been draining this town of every bit of its living essence for centuries. Droughts come more often here than elsewhere, as with blights and bouts of anemia. Livestock withers. Women become barren. Infants become sickly and die. Even the water seems to inspire greater thirst rather than quench it.”

She nodded. “He must be very strong by now then?”

The dhampir shrugged. “Not as much as you might think but that doesn’t mean he isn’t extremely dangerous. Elder Ones were clever, more cunning and erudite than you would expect. They endure by the sheer will to survive and they’re virtuosos at doing it. But their diminished humanity is their greatest weakness. Patriarchs often underestimate and misunderstand the people around them. They cannot connect with human thinking and therefore often appear to make strange and unsound decisions. This is why I have suggested not attempting to physically fight him as the first line of attack. He’ll be extraordinarily capable in a face to face confrontation. I know it’s Trevor’s preferred tactic; to engage in epic battle with the forces of darkness and all that, but we’ll need to be smarter this time.”

“What do you suggest?” Sypha pressed.

“Trap him. Somehow.”

The young mage took in a slow, pained, breath. “I also found some more of the history of the church. And the inscribed plate the Father mentioned.”

“And?”

“There was a battle here. A long time ago but no one talks about it. Apparently, a group of Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land encountered a fleeing encampment of refugees somewhere near the mountain overlook. Jewish refugees. They were…not kind to them.”

“Not shocking. Crusaders never had much of a reputation for tolerance.”

“Some of the journal entries from that time suggest that the Crusaders murdered many of them but it is unclear exactly why or to whom it is specifically referring. But then there was some kind of cataclysm. Something attacked the fortress that once existed here. Leveled it. Wiped out the entire Order. The Templar Superior was the last to die, according to the survivors. They describe the land itself rising up against him, swallowing everything in its path until there was nothing left but flat plain in the middle of a caldera. It’s where those survivors built this town. The rest of them left shortly afterwards, I guess, and founded some of the Jewish enclaves up-country. Since then, Nicăieri has existed as a kind of…stopping off point. The original population was eventually replaced by travelers and immigrants from all over Wallachia and is now…this.”

“Likely Gamaliel’s intent.” Alucard rejoined.

“What do you mean?”

“He came with the refugees. He was also fleeing whatever it was that was persecuting the Jews in their homeland. When they encountered the Crusaders here in the valley, he possibly gave them the benefit of the doubt to begin with but annihilated them once they became a threat. His people then settled throughout the area and he has not abandoned them. Instead, he gathers all the outsiders who come in to the region here…and feeds on them.”

“That explains why the old rabbis still speak prayers to the earth or cast rites in contact with the land.”

“Precisely. They know he is here and that he continues to protect them, so they give their cursory obeisance. Interestingly, it’s what equally draws others to this town. If they accept the terms of his consumption, he protects them as well, as it were.”

“How does one lay a trap for such a creature?” She asked with growing concern. “Should we lure him out?”

“Unnecessary.” Alucard replied. “He’ll come to us. He knows we’re here.”

At that, Trevor burst unceremoniously through the door, scattering dried flakes of mud as he went. The sun had finally fully set and it was clear from the sounds flittering up the stairs behind him that the tavern below was starting its evening in earnest. Laden with the results of Sypha’s shopping list, he dumped the irregular packages onto the floor before straightening up and cracking his back with a relieved groan.

“Ok. That should be everything. I mean, as much as is possible around here.” He looked over at his two companions: one sitting bedside in a chair next to the other one as if nursing a sick-house patient. A very delectably nude sick-house patient. “So, what are we doing?”

“Formulating a plan.” The dhampir answered. “Or, something like one, anyway.”

“Great. So, what’s the plan?”

“Gamaliel will come to us. Sooner, I think, rather than later. We need to be prepared.”

“Yeah.” Trevor chuffed, waving his hand around the loose pile. “I sort of figured that’s what all this was for. But what do you want me to do?”

Alucard smiled. “What you do best, Belmont.”

Trevor sighed and crossed his arms. “And what exactly is that, Adrian?”

“Gamaliel will come for me first, and I want him to. He’s already drawn to me; to what I am.”

“You…want to be bait?”

“Adrian.” Sypha interjected. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Good or not, it’s already in motion.” The dhampir replied. “I’ve seen him in dreams…and I can feel him getting closer. Ever since we passed Farthing, he’s been right there, at the back of my mind. I wasn’t sure that’s what it was at first, but now I’m certain of it. If I can keep his interest, you’ll have a chance at him.”

With careful steps, Trevor approached the bed where Alucard still lay, barely clad from the waist down in the bed sheet and in a state of soft repose. Toeing at the Catena as it neared his foot, the hunter stood pensively for several seconds.

“So that’s it isn’t it? That’s why you were so…receptive. You’ve been luring in a monster.”

My, wasn’t Trevor the perceptive one when it served his interests. But he was only somewhat correct and Alucard was feeling honest.

“Partially.” He said, a little more seductively than the hunter was prepared for. “But if we’re going to make this work, you’ll have to do what I tell _you_ for a change.”

“Uh huh. And that is?”

“Come back to bed. The both of you. And I’ll show you.”


	12. The Ties Unwind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (A little fun, a little fisticuffs....)

**The Ties Unwind**

Did you never, in riding through the woods on a still June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm layer of air, and in a minute later, strike the chill stratum of the atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in cleaving through the green waters of the lake, find yourself in a tepid streak; a gratuitously warm bath a little underdone, to which the skin of your back soon flashed back into the cold realities of deep, bottomless, water? Such was the approach of a shadowed figure into the midst of a humble village. He had no form as such, no discernible outline in the dim light; but his passage was felt as a void. A sudden absence of what should have been there, rather than a presence of what was unwelcome.

Gamaliel was of a kind, a body and mind, not governed _by_ laws but only _according_ to them. He may be tangentially aware of the human typology to his being but he knew that its movements were governed, not by his own intent, but by the same mathematical rules as the larger universe. Which was to say that there were certain thoughts and actions which he did not consider something he might have simply come up himself within the moment but ones that he would hardly have been able to miss as they passed through him on their way to other philosophers. It was, for this reason, that the Elder One often had the sense that he’d done just the same things before. Been called to the same places. Met the same people.

A priest stood just outside of the threshold of an abandoned church. His manner and his cassock were the same as every other priest Gamaliel had ever encountered holding a vigil of the last-bells over his flock. But this one stood at an odd distance; observing the men coming in from their fields as if from afar despite the fact that they were less than a few meters from him. The Elder felt, for a moment, as though he knew this priest, but the passing familiarity was one he did not imbue with much meaning. Whether he should know this man or not was irrelevant. What he needed was his blood, not his counsel. 

To his surprise, the tattered priest did not jump or shout when he appeared before him. He did not scream or attempt to back away in panic through the doors of the waiting narthex, even though it was quite clear from his expression that he recognized something of what the creature before him was, if not his specific identity. A tense moment passed as Gamaliel waited to see what the priest would do. Call for help? Brandish a cross? Run? But weirdly, the man did none of these things. Rather, he seemed almost fascinated by him; dragging a rheumy gaze over the long tresses that framed the Elder’s face and down his pale body unobscured in the rising light of the moon. As if mesmerized, he then reached out to touch Gamaliel; though he was slightly too far away to make actual contact.

Curious, the ancient vampire stepped forward and into the touch, which trembled over his shoulder and seemed to trace the tattooed lines that adored his skin there. A hieroglyph of three reeds near his collarbone, a spiral sun on his neck, and a banded stripe; like serpents, from his chin to his chest. He didn’t know what captivated the human so, but he also didn’t care. Since no alarm had been raised and the farm-hands returning to the safety of the town had clearly taken no notice of his presence nor the other man’s distraction, he simply seized the priest; grasping onto his shoulders with bruising force. A gargled sound of fear was all that accompanied it and Gamaliel wasted no time in sinking his teeth into the man’s throat right there on the doorstep of the church.

Ah, what a delight. He shuddered at the first taste of rich, living, blood he’d had in more than two hundred years. He’d hardly remembered the sensation of flesh giving in beneath his fangs and of supping on heat and heady salt from a heartbeat strong enough to bring it to his lips without persuasion. But he did so now, with a pleased growl, as the priest barely even offered him a token struggle. It was rapturous to drink again but…it was not what he truly wanted. 

Without preamble, Gamaliel withdrew his teeth from the wound and dropped the man to the ground. He’d taken enough to enliven his form but not much else and the priest, though dazed and babbling, still breathed. It wasn’t that the Elder had any pity for him or that he thought of the man as a wretched thing deserving of mercy, but merely that the sustenance provided was as a glass of bum wine to an aristocrat who craved a true Bordeaux. It was unsatisfying. It was only making him thirst ever the more.

This was why he hunted a dhampir now. A rarified creature he’d not experienced before; whose autochthonous blood tantalized his senses with subtle impressions of erudite literacy and barely restrained brutality. The sleeping child he’d found at Gresit had been perfect in design, exquisite in his articulation, and a delight to the ancient’s aesthetic predilections. But unconscious, he could only know his body and had not tasted what he desired of his mind. 

Joyously, the dhampir was awake now.

Gamaliel reached out into the unnerving silence. Past the church and the cemetery, past the terrified priest sobering up and crawling away to the holy sepulcher, past the houses with braids of garlic on their doorframes and witch bottles in their windows, and on past the field roads of ragweed and red clay to the threshold of a tavern named for the only traveler’s thoroughfare that crossed the entire region. There, he heard him. But what was it that he was saying? Was he…calling out to him?

The images that immediately diffused into Gamaliel’s mind startled him. But only briefly. He saw the man he was seeking, the one called Alucard of Wallachia, Adrian Fahrenheit Ţepeş, and the Son of Dracula. He was in a room, distorted by far sight, but plain and made of wood. He surmised immediately that he must be somewhere in the upper levels of the tavern. The Elder could hear carousing below and the unmistakable clatter of drink and stupidity. Alucard, however, lay gasping in pleasure as two others seemed to float around him. They touched him, caressed him, climbed over top him.

But the name he called out wasn’t theirs.

With a tightening in his jaw, Gamaliel forced his senses to focus, to lean in on the young man that beckoned him so sweetly. The dhampir was begging for release, but as the vision twisted, it became more and more difficult to tell exactly what his meaning was. The Elder could see a chain binding Alucard to his bed, supine and prostrate. Thick, shimmering, links of silver, steel, and bronze alloy subdued him from his arms to his neck with the luster of unnatural magics. Even more, a hunter had him down; the famed Belmont crest clear enough on the embroidered tunic the larger man was now discarding to the floor. Gamaliel snarled reflexively at the image. He had not himself encountered a Belmont in person but he knew them well enough from their reputations among Hospitallers, Templars, and the Inquisition. In truth, he’d long hoped the bloodline had died out but, alas, it would seem that at least one more remained. Spawn of the Crusader, Leon Belmont.

And he was in possession of the Son of Dracula. Chained. And desperate. But was Alucard crying out for emancipation or exultation? Relief or rebellion? In the end, it didn’t matter though. He would reclaim his prize from the hunter easily enough.

He shifted his attention to the other shape. A woman, no less. Slender and wiry, she moved with fae grace and a wanton intent. He then observed as she went to straddle to the bound dhampir, sliding back onto his hips with her own moan of excited pleasure. He did not recognize her though, short of the wind-whipped hair and limber fingers of a practitioner of magic. She was no witch however, about whom the Elder was well-versed but appeared to be something else. He would have to inquire closer. 

Gamaliel then considered all of what he saw for another moment. The scene he witnessed confused him. Alucard helpless in occult bindings, a willowy mage bringing her ready sex down onto him with an elated squeal as he bucked into her, and a Belmont hunter taking up his own position behind the woman; no doubt seeking to claim the dhampir for himself as well. These humans were mating with their captive. How indecent of them. 

How odd. 

Humanity’s fear of the supernatural was instinctual and absolute. What they could not subjugate, they destroyed, and if there ever was a man to walk the face of the earth who could not ever truly be brought under the whip, it was Dracula and his kin. For this reason, and this reason alone, the dhampir should have known what danger he would be in at the mercy of mortals. Not to mention such mortals as these. They would never accept his strength or his superior fortitude. And they would never tolerate his immortality. This, as Gamaliel well knew, was the crux of it all. Humans feared Death more than anything else in all of their existence and the very nature of the presence of those for whom it would never be a reality could drive even the sanest men into covetous rage. So, what then would be the point of these mortals possessing him intimately? Did they mean to steal the secrets of effective agelessness for themselves? Could Alucard even offer it?

The dhampir’s mind called out again and Gamaliel could hear the distress reverberating along the telepathic link. Alucard was being taken by the both of them and the Elder could almost feel the ache of submission as it moved through his body. The clink of the chains in time with the undulating movements the dhampir was helpless to control. The quiet words of sovereignty whispered to him from both hunter and mage. He cried out openly and flushed with desire. Oh, how the mighty had indeed fallen, as the Christians would say.

The Elder moved on air and wafting breeze, unseen by even the very few who dared to be out at such an hour as this one. He sought out and found the Broad Lane Inn on the furthest outer reaches of the town’s border and quickly scanned the upper levels for the blue-white light that would tell him he’d found the correct location. He listened for the heated breaths of human arousal and was drawn further into the town square proper until he spied the open window on the second floor. The moon glinted off the glass as something pale and glistening was reflected from within.

The sash parted beneath the Elder’s hands without the slightest sound and he drifted through the open portal as little more than smoke from the hearths below. Gamaliel rarely perceived when he was corporeal or ethereal anymore and could no more feel the solidity of his physical body as he could tell the difference between dreaming and awake. In so many ways, they were the same thing and required the same application of will. He wished to be in the tavern room and, therefore, he was. But whether or not others perceived him was another matter. Sliding deftly over the window sill and onto the floor, he approached the bed on the further side; pausing only momentarily to take in the sights, scents, and sounds of what had transpired in his vision and what was taking place now before him.

Alucard lay, spent and wearied, wrapped in chains that bound him to either side of the sturdy timber bed frame. The hunter knelt between his thighs, and was still coaxing pleading cries from the dhampir with wide, strong, hands. Their mistress, the waifish mage, rested atop the prone form of her lover and scratched at his chest with the blunt edges of her nails. She was still clad in loose blue robes, hitched up to her waist, but the other two appeared to be completely nude, much to the Elder’s gratification. None of them, however, seemed to notice him or the open window now gusting in cool night air to tickle at overheated skin.

The dhampir whimpered again, fruitlessly pulling at the chain that contained him. The Elder stalked forward slowly; eyes transfixed by the harmony of their contest. The hunter thrust with rhythmic surety, the woman rode their combined movement as one might a wild colt, and the dhampir endured it, though he seemed as if he might give in to his baser nature at any moment. His fangs, though smaller than those of a true vampire, were sharp and prominent. His fair skin painted red with provocation. His deadly nails extended and tearing at his bonds. Gamaliel believed that he could watch them forever. But such a thing would be decidedly unwise and he had other plans. The Elder then considered his angle of attack more thoroughly. He should take the hunter first. Drain him. Cast him aside. And then the mage. The dhampir would certainly not be able to assist them, even if he were so inclined, that much appeared obvious.

He moved towards Trevor, approaching the man from behind. For a moment, however, he stopped to appreciate the fine musculature of his back and the enticing scent of the moisture gathered there. If anything could be said of the Belmont Clan, it was that they tended to produce healthy specimens and this one seemed appropriately robust. Smooth, tanned, skin and fine, pleasing, lines. As such, the Elder was very much looking forward to tasting him. But so engrossed was he in the finer points of appreciation, so caught up in the artistry of the hunt, that Gamaliel did not notice the subtle tension that passed from dhampir to hunter. Nor did he perceive the exchange of meaningful gazes that heralded what was to come next.

He moved to strike. But the bared neck that he had expected to be there vanished. Instead, with the dhampir’s help and leverage, the hunter had grabbed onto Alucard’s raised hands and vaulted clear of the bed with the mage wrapped in his opposite arm. They both hit the floor, rolled, and were on their feet in an instant. Already, the Belmont was in possession of a whip and the mage a readied spell of fiery orbs and pinpoints of withering heat. It was also an instant too long for the Elder to have hesitated. Gamaliel snarled and tensed to complete the assault. That they now faced him only aggravated him further. He was poised to spring and there was nothing a little tumble was going to do but delay the inevitable.

“Adrian!” The woman shouted. Gamaliel turned, but it was too late.

The dhampir was already up and had gotten to his knees. But how was that possible? Was he not bound by a…

The scream that echoed throughout the entirety of the town was one of unmitigated madness. Rage, fury, erupted from a wan form only recently freed from the imprisonments of sleep and age. Alucard had not been chained by the Catena; it had only been resting across his chest. Draped but not fastened. His struggle had only been an act; a bit of playful theater straight out of the Elder’s own taunting words from the nightmares before. They had been laying in wait for him and now that Gamaliel had approached their stage, the dhampir leapt up, bindings in hand. He then threw it around his neck, looped it over his shoulders, and pulled the accursed thing tight through his arms before anyone else could even react.

With the instincts of a caged animal, Gamaliel wrenched the chain with every bit of his considerable strength, completely expecting to shatter it; only to find the bonds cutting into his flesh of their own accord. He fell backwards, thrashing with psychotic power as he tried to pull free again but every movement he made only seemed to cause the chain to constrict harder around him. It was as though he had been suddenly taken up in the serpent coils of the Devil in Eden himself and no matter how much raw energy he poured into his resistance; he could not shake the fetter. It had a mind of its own and slithered tighter and tighter around him with each attempt. Within seconds, his left arm was uselessly pinned and his right was quickly becoming so.

The Belmont hunter, however, did not loiter around to see if it was enough. The whip in his hand was immediately useful in knocking the Elder off of his feet whenever he tried to regain his advantage; helping to further entangle Gamaliel in the Catena as he struggled. The mage equally was able to use her fire magics to contain him; alighting various sections of the room and then extinguishing them as suited her purposes. Gamaliel shrieked, but was quickly becoming aware that the situation was now exceedingly dangerous for him. The Son of Dracula had not yet raised a blow and when he did, it could be devastating in his currently incarcerated state.

“Sypha, fire on the left!” Trevor yelled. She did so and Gamaliel was forced further into the center of the room. Another crack of the whip and a bloom of pain across his midsection compelled him to kneel.

“Adrian! Pin him down!”

The sword came out of nowhere; lancing into the Elder’s thigh before embedding itself in the heavy floor planks below. At some point, the dhampir had also managed to don his pants again and now moved on swift bare feet to wrap his hand into the trailing edge of the Catena and pull the Gamaliel fully to the ground. He landed with a hard thud; splintering several of the boards as he again tried to free himself from the scourge of the holy chain and from the looming stance of the dhampir above him. Alucard, for his part, had no doubt that the incredible amount of noise that must be coming from their room at this point was not going unnoticed elsewhere. He only hoped that the three of them had made enough of an impassioned ruckus earlier that it would be dismissed as carnal fornication and that no one would come looking in on them to make sure.

But Gamaliel was not yet subdued. Though, something in his demeanor had changed.

For a moment, it seemed as if the Elder was about to relent. He stopped flailing. He did not attempt to undo the chain that was now nested into his flesh so deeply that furrows of broken skin had formed around it. He crouched down, inattentive to the blade that still stuck through his leg and into the floor. He glared at the three of them but then…smiled. 

Trevor was the first to catch on. “Oh no you don…”

He raised his remaining mobile arm and one foot, and brought them down hard. With a single massive blow, the planks of the floor blew apart. The struts and scaffolding of the ceiling beneath them snapped in half, and the Elder fell through into the tavern below; crashing down onto a large table with such a racket that it sent wood splinters, nails, mugs, and people in all directions. Immediately, the entire tavern erupted. Fights broke out. Fists and teeth were brought to bear. The insanity so ridiculously excessive it could only be partially explained by the lit match that had just fallen through the upper floors and into the powder keg of the Broad Lane Inn public house. Gamaliel was having his intended effect on their minds just as much as his unexpected arrival was having an effect on their emotions. This town, after all, was his. The din was soon unconscionable and within the blink of an eye, everything was fast devolving into a smear of brown and red carnage.

It was absolute chaos.

Trevor, on the other hand, was rather put out and simply walked to the edge of the now impressive hole in the floor and stared down at the brawl exploding under their feet. Scowling as Gamaliel was swallowed up in the crowd and buried beneath a combination of detritus and drunks.

“Fuck.”

“Indeed.” Alucard replied from the far side, quickly helping Sypha up from where she had been knocked over in the wreckage.

“Fine. Let’s go get him.”

“Trevor?” The dhampir interjected before the hunter could unceremoniously drop through.

“What?”

“Please put your pants on first.”


	13. Havoc

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (And before you ask, no...Trevor is NOT going to be happy about this. - Nas)

**Havoc**

Trevor hastily pulled his tunic over his head and stumbled after Alucard, who had not only managed to dress completely but had already recalled his sword in the split seconds it took him to cross the room and leap through the hole in the floor. The hunter growled. The dhampir’s speed was part of what made him so aggravatingly elegant. Being able to accomplish such mundanities as buttoning a shirt or retying his pants without being observed ultimately gave the impression of a man who lived above the petty mortal concerns of maintenance and care. But as just one of those noisome humans himself, Trevor had no choice but to struggle through his sleeves and wrap his belt, wasting precious time retrieving his weapons before he could join Alucard wading into the masses. He motioned to Sypha and jumped down.

The scene below was a sea of bodies adrift on tumultuous waves of seething anger and anarchy. Pandemonium swallowed the three companions in the instant they landed; fists and shouts flying in all directions as dhampir, hunter, and mage attempted to clear themselves a path through the tempest. They might as well, however, have been attempting to part the Red Sea. And without Moses and the Prophets to guide them it was an equally failed result. People slammed into them from all directions; feral as beasts, fighting each other and the furniture for reasons no one could discern. It was as if Gamaliel’s abrupt arrival had sprung an altogether different kind of trap; one where the chum had been swirled into the morass of circling sharks in time to start the feeding frenzy just as the interlopers dove in.

Alucard dodged a stray kick before climbing up onto one of the remaining intact tables a few feet away. He had no doubt that Gamliel was already on the move but the Catena binding him still meant that he wouldn’t be able to go far or very fast. The stricture of the chain’s holy magics would dampen his strength considerably and make it nearly impossible for him to shift between corporeal and incorporeal forms. As such, they’d be able to track him and, hopefully in the end, subdue him.

Trevor, on the other hand, was quite happy in his element. Raising the nearest brawler by his coat before punching him square in the jaw and throwing him into the next man stepping up to take his chances. Several bar patrons went down this way, a fist to the face or a knee to a vulnerable tendon and the hunter began to approach the area where the Elder was last seen. Sypha, for her part, was finding it easier to follow in Trevor’s wake and continued to shield them from backward blows with a few well-placed ice barriers. Bar fights really weren’t so much her thing and she was already worried that their plans might do more harm here than good.

The dhampir scanned the crowd, honing his exceptional vision in on some of the less noticeable details of the room. A deep scrape on the wooden planks beneath two men rolling back and forth on the floor, a swipe of blood on a chair leg, a man with his neck broken lying as-yet unnoticed next to an overturned cask. The Elder had already made his way to the main door of the tavern and by the looks of the corpses hunched next to the lintels, had passed through it only seconds ago. Alucard shouted to the others, waving his hand to the outside. Trevor nodded. 

They all knew they would have to move quickly if any of this was going to work. Alucard’s plan had been almost daft by Trevor’s reckoning, even though he had to admit that it was their best shot at victory. Or, if nothing else, a useful stalemate. It was the dhampir’s belief that fighting Gamaliel would only end in a losing battle of attrition. They had little in the way of weapons that could truly harm him and Elders were well known for wearing their prey down through their unimaginable endurance or by going to ground when clearly threatened. But Alucard’s ruse had been successful, drawing Gamaliel in by playing to the Elder’s fascination with Trevor’s dominance and baiting him with a prize few vampires would willingly resist. Ensnaring him in the Catena then only precluded the final step: putting him back to sleep.

Trevor was the first to come crashing out of the tavern, shoving two men off of his leg with a hard boot. Sypha then hopped free of the din as Alucard bounded over the top of the scuffle on light and nimble feet. For so many reasons, Trevor truly hated it when he did that. It was, of course, an effective strategy in battle, which was why the dhampir used it, but it also struck him as showing off. Just as much as Alucard hardly needed to fuss with an unruly button, he could similarly ignore most mundane slings and arrows as mere distractions. It made him beautiful and it made him arrogant. …All the better to bring him back down to Earth later.

“Where is he?” The hunter growled, squinting into the night and dismissing his lurid but absent-minded thoughts.

“Not far.” Alucard replied. “Sypha, do you have ready what I told you?”

“I think so.” She answered. “I’ve never attempted a sleep spell before.”

“Well, it’s not a sleep spell such as you might think of it.” The dhampir continued to pick through their surroundings with an attentive gaze. “It wouldn’t work on normal humans. Insomnia, or such. It’s specific to vampires and our kin.”

“So.” She bantered back good-naturedly. “You’re saying that I could this on you later?”

Blithely, Alucard actually chanced a smile. “I suppose. But I am trusting you not to misuse it, Speaker. And I know what it looks like before it is done.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well and good.” Trevor interrupted. “But we’ve got an Elder prowling around out there right now and I don’t see anything.”

The trio fell silent.

“There.” Alucard finally concluded, pointing to a break in a small copse of trees near the road. “He’s not far. Just beyond that pathway.”

Trevor coiled his whip and straightened his tunic. “Alright. Adrian, you and I will get him down again. Syph, you get the ritual or whatever prepared so that as soon as he’s still enough, you crack him over the head with it. Got it?”

“Got it.” She sniffed.

The three of them pursued carefully; stalking quietly along the trail. Not that they thought they might approach and ambush without Gamaliel being able to hear them but more that they needed leave enough to hear any sound that might slip by as the Elder fervently attempted to free himself from the trap. Blessedly, it was unlikely that Gamaliel would attempt to fully engage them with one hand literally tied behind his back, so they had little worry that the trick would be returned. To Alucard’s concern though, he noted several broken chain links thrown into the dirt as they passed. If they weren’t decisive enough in their attacks, the ancient vampire would eventually strain the powers of the Catena enough to break it and if he did, they would all be dead in a manner of heartbeats. 

Up ahead, an angry howl caught their attention.

Through shadows in the trees, they could make out the wild form as it tore at its own flesh. That he might gnaw off his own hand to escape was obvious enough, if not for the fact that the chains bound his entire torso and he had only one limb unrestrained enough to use. From where they could see, however, Gamaliel was crouched next to a massive old stump and was trying to angle his body such that a raised part of the root might slide between him and the Catena. From there, he ought to be able to leverage his own impervious flesh as a vice to twist the chains into breaking. Alucard, however, had no intention of giving him the opportunity.

He sent his sword-familiar out ahead and directed it straight into the offending branch, snapping it off at the base. To his surprise, Gamaliel did not immediately turn to acknowledge him, despite the blade just inches from his face, though he grew suddenly very still. The eyes that then regarded them from beneath lawless locks of auburn hair were inhuman. Golden irises with an ovoid pupil bespoke an animal, a shimmer of reflected light at the retina told of a predator, but a glimmer of sable brown indicated the possibility of a soul. There was no fear in him as he spied their approach, only a curious sort of interest. In another life, Alucard would have described the Elder as handsome. Tall, lean, and angular, with splendidly dark hair to his waist contrasted against the smooth, pale, skin of undeath. He would have been popular in aristocratic circles, had he cared to attend to them, and in all likelihood, would have governed his own Caucasus domain had he been so inclined to perform for Dracula’s attention. But as it stood, Gamaliel was none of these things and much more beyond them. The dhampir respected him for what he had done for his own people, just as much as he knew he could not let him remain awake for what he would most certainly do to everyone else.

He left the sword embedded in the tree and casually approached, letting Gamaliel watch him with an intent stare as he came towards him. It was not unlike approaching a caged tiger, and he knew that the Elder was no less dangerous for being constrained than was a sluggish bear just out of hibernation. But the dhampir had other wiles to make use of than just his martial training, even if he was still unpracticed at it.

“Careful.” Trevor called out, readying his whip for a sudden lunge.

Alucard held up a hand, indicating that he meant for them to wait as he knelt down to meet the Elder face to face.

As was the habit of immortals, their discourse was calm and polite; almost congenial.

“Hello, Gamaliel.” He spoke softly, with a gentle tone.

With a light smirk, the Elder responded. “Hello, Adrian. Nice to finally see you up and about.”

The dhampir winced. He’d suspected a prior encounter with this creature in his dreams but hadn’t the evidence to support certainty. He wouldn’t let it unmoor him, however.

“You know why we’ve come here.”

“I suspect you seek to put me down, is that not correct? Slay the monster and be heroes again for a day?”

“Not as much as you might think. You’ve been in control of this town for a long time. The entire region, I suspect. Everyone here relies on your protection, even if it will eventually cost them everything. Still, your absence would only mean further destruction. Wouldn’t it?”

“How perceptive of you, Drăculea.” The Elder hissed lightly as the Catena tightened further.

“This might come as a surprise to you.” Alucard continued, glancing down at the chains with momentary empathy. “But I do not actually wish to harm you. There are worse things in this world than an unkind Patriarch. Yet, you must also understand that I cannot allow you to annihilate these people, no matter what the sins of their fathers.”

“Ah.” Gamaliel breathed. “A subject close to your own heart, I see. So, tell me then. What do you plan to do about it?”

With an almost demure expression, Alucard softened his posture as he leaned forward. “I will make you a deal.”

“Adrian!” Sypha called out, only to be met with another raised hand. Trevor growled in response, already deeply uncomfortable with what was happening. He had seen Alucard behave this way before; almost passively diplomatic, but never quite so openly and never in conversation with something the likes of Gamaliel. He wondered now if the dhampir had somehow taken leave of his senses or had been enthralled when no one was looking. He readied both his whip and his short sword. If the Elder moved on him, he’d be ready.

“I’m listening.” The other vampire growled uncomfortably.

“I will feed you.”

The shock and surprise were palpable. Sypha’s jaw actually dropped and Trevor very nearly yelled at his companion outright. Even the Elder seemed taken aback.

“Is that not what you wanted?” Alucard asked with a lilt in his voice. “To taste something forbidden to you, something so completely out of your reach as to inspire obsession in every waking moment?”

Gamaliel regarded him with suspicion. The Son of Dracula was truly nothing like he had imagined him. He had anticipated an erudite brat. Cultured and well-educated, but shallow and likely cruel as the one who had sired him. A scion who might tamper with his vocabulary but only with the intent of counterfeiting the currency of moral intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue for amusement and repeat the Banquet of Saturn without remorse. Not the kind of man who might waste a full cask of water on a dying soldier; in that he had no need of it himself but also because it might bring a moment of comfort back into the world.

“And in exchange?”

“You will go back to _sleep_.” The dhampir stated bluntly. “You will return to torpor. Your presence in the land will continue to protect it from the hordes of hellspawn and demons that are about to descend upon the people of Wallachia. Just as my father intends.”

The Elder chuckled. “You went to all this trouble to make…an ally of me?” 

“Not an ally. An… accessory. As the horrors of war spread across this country, you will shelter the people of this valley. _All_ of its people. Until such a time as they are safe again. And as my bargain, I will give you enough blood, _my_ blood, to sustain yourself in slumber. To dream of what you will. Visit me again in nightmares after that if you must, but sleep. Forever.”

Gamaliel stared back at the dhampir with a mixture of skepticism and interest but Alucard didn’t waver no matter how he looked at him. “And…if I refuse your offer?”

“You can fight me. Fight all three of us, if that’s what you want. Maybe you’ll even win. But you won’t come out of it well.” Alucard lowered his tone into a blend of sensuality and menace. “You will be grievously wounded and those chains will never come off. You will never be free of the pain as they sear into you every time you move. Reminding you of what you could have had instead. Not unless you accept my terms, that is. You know what a Catena is and how this works. And more so, just as likely, after such a fight you know that you’d be left exactly where you were when this all started. Dry, dusty, and disinterested in a town filled with ghosts.” He moved in dangerously close. “How _fucking_ boring would that be?”

The Elder almost laughed. “You are not what I expected, Adrian Țepeș. I have known only a few dhampirs in my time, rare as you are, but I suppose I should have known that the Heir of the Dragon would be a rarer creature still. Suitor to a Speaker, lover to a Belmont. You would allow me to drink from you, as much as I please, and then consign me back to the grave by your own will?”

“That’s the deal.”

“And you will not resist my touch?”

“I will not.”

“And your…companions? Will they stand aside and do nothing as you give yourself to me?”

Before Trevor could indulge in his own inevitably vulgar style of answer, Alucard replied. “They will. Now. What say you?”

In all the long centuries of unliving death that the Elder had experienced, he had not often been in a position to parlay with his subjects, nor was he often inclined to treat with them in the manner that these adversaries demanded. And if not for the fact that this dhampir was noble by birthright and by character, he might have declined on principle. His more savage nature called out for vengeance at the insult of being chained but his higher processes were utterly intrigued. The chance to savor none other than Adrian Țepeș as a willing host was deeply desirable. To do so under the auspices of a jealous Belmont hunter pacing in the foreground even better. In the most bizarre twist of events, Alucard’s offer actually appealed to him more than his original intention of killing them first and draining each of them later. After which, he would have returned to the crypt anyway. To sleep, and to dream, of all of it, over and over again, for years to come.

The Elder brushed his lower lip gently along the dhampir’s shoulder. “Very well. I accept.”

Alucard rose quickly and returned to where Trevor was shuffling about in frustration and Sypha was busy with the nuances of a ritual she was still in the process of learning. He shed his coat, handing it to the hunter, before divesting himself of the white linen shirt as well.

“Adrian.” Trevor interjected. “This was _not_ in the plan.” 

“Yes it was.” He replied with an offhanded smile. “It just wasn’t in _your_ plan.”

“Sypha is just about finished.” He snarled, waving his unencumbered hand towards the concentrating mage. “He’s not moving. Just…stall a little longer. We’ve almost got this.”

“I know you want a fight.” The dhampir rejoined. “But if you try it, I swear to you, Belmont, you will not get what you hope for. That whip won’t even break his skin. My sword can only pierce him on a direct hit and Sypha’s magic will quickly run out before he is brought down. He looks hurt to your eyes, but I assure you, he is only barely restrained. And even if we were successful, everyone in this town would suffer for it and suffer for it endlessly. Long after we’ve gone. If I can keep him bound to the land, they’ll have a chance to recover as he sleeps. He’ll be well fed and inclined to do as I’ve asked. I know the character of my own kith. Let me do this and then…” He trailed off thoughtfully.

“And then?” Trevor helpfully supplied.

“And then I am yours.”

The pointed look that passed between them caught the hunter off guard. It was heated and direct, but at the same time, an open challenge. Alucard was anything but tamed and in some ways, he meant to make that clear now. 

“Fine.” Trevor snapped. “But if he tears you apart, don’t expect me to be able to stop it before you lose a limb you won’t regrow.”

“Mind Sypha.” Was the only response. “As soon as the spell is ready, cast it. The Catena will keep him, I will enthrall him. From there, she should be able to send him back into repose. And if at all possible, I would prefer that she do so _before_ I am drained completely.” The dhampir then turned on his heels and strode back to the waiting Elder.

With a slow, irritable, breath, the hunter let him go. The dhampir looked now much as he had when they had first met in Gresit, and he was getting the feeling it was somewhat intentional.

Alucard, however, would have been lying to say that he felt no apprehension at what he was about to do but years of tutelage in the arts, sciences, and politics of war served him well in this sense. Without a backward glance he knelt down carefully, until he was nearly resting on the Elder’s lap but still able to steady himself with one hand on the tree stump; conspicuously close to his waiting sword. He did not resist when he felt the cold hand snake around his waist to pull him closer and then slide up his back to anchor him more firmly. The dhampir turned his head and sighed. He was actually unsure of exactly what to expect beyond the immediate.

Gamaliel, interestingly, seemed to sense as much.

“Tell me, Drăculea…have you ever done this before? Have you ever felt the Kiss of another of your own?”

“No.”

A soft laugh tickled his ears from somewhere near the side of his neck. It was unnerving that he could feel no breath against his skin, or heat pressed into his chest. No pulse beneath him. Nothingness, if not for the words whispered from a dark, hungry, mouth disembodied from everything around it. In an instant, he saw the dream again. The Hellmouth. Falling down into the well. Swallowed up by the Earth and by a beguiling figure drenched in red. Alucard suddenly startled and was about to leap to his feet with a shout of warning when a powerful arm embraced him, dragged him down to the leaf litter, and he felt, for the first time in his life, the sharp sting of fangs as they sunk into his throat and silenced his cry.


	14. Who Cleft the Devil's Foot?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (And here ends this story. But that’s not to say it’s totally the end. Obviously, I’ve left myself room for a continuing saga. Should inspiration strike, I promise to follow it to its inevitable conclusion! But for now, I’m off to do a few other things and keep my commitments to other projects. I hope this was enjoyable! Or, if not, at least somewhat interesting. – Nas)

**Who Cleft the Devil’s Foot?**

Trevor Belmont did not often have cause for true and virtuous indignation. His usual demeanor was one of forbearance, an ideal nihility, but that seemed inadequate here. If his mind could be heard, it would have sounded like that of a philosopher laboring to express a certain condition, involving hitherto undescribed feelings. All of which could have just as easily been explained by the simple participle – _anger_. It added piquancy to his current mood as mushrooms do to a sauce. But it was also no better than a toadstool, odious to the senses and poisonous to the intellect, when it spawned itself into his thoughts; diluted to suit the provincial climate.

And yet, he was transfixed. Alucard had knelt and now remained compliant in the Elder’s embrace, as he had promised; the fiend suckling at his neck with obvious relish. The hunter had seen the teeth that pierced him; long, straight, fangs like a cobra sinking into unblemished skin until a well of blood had come up beneath them. Then the creature’s mouth closing over the dhampir’s flesh as it drank deeply of the offered Communion. A Covenant between monsters, shared in the nectar of stolen life. Of some additional interest was the subtle loosening of the Catena as Gamaliel continued his feeding with Alucard poised in his lap. Apparently, his acquiescence to the bargain had registered with the holy magic of the chains and as the upper part slipped down ever so slightly, the Elder was able to free his left arm enough to wrap both around the dhampir’s body and cradle him closer.

The scene thus before the Belmont hunter was like that of the Pieta. The mother cradling the child in the sacrament of sacrifice. But rather than the adoring Madonna and wounded Christ, he observed the inverse: a false Father consuming a disgraced Son. But it wasn’t a perversion of faith that particularly vexed Trevor Belmont, it was the jealousy boiling up in response that he hadn’t anticipated. How many dead poets could he call on now, whom living ones no longer remembered to cite? Would they explain his fury at the sight of another man bending over the dhampir’s pale forehead until his tresses caressed his cheek and rained gold into his dreams?

Alucard did not moan at the contact however, or at least, not in the way that Trevor had thought he might. To the hunter’s dread, the dhampir seemed more restless and distressed than enraptured. His lips were parted as he breathed heavily through the sensations so obviously shivering through him, he shifted against the other’s grasp even if he did not outright resist it, and began to flush with what Trevor could only ascertain to be wretched shame. Which was to say that the dhampir’s response was not one of pleasure, but of surrender. He also knew well enough that the dhampir’s submission only ever came at great cost to him but this was one price that was quickly becoming too steep. Too rich for his own blood, so to speak.

“Syph?” He glanced down to the woman near his feet. “Any time now.”

She actually growled in response. “It’s not that easy, Trevor. These components are complicated and if I don’t get them right the first time, we won’t have anything left to try it again.”

“We’re about to not have anything left of Adrian if we don’t try it soon.”

“I am going as fast as I can.”

If the dhampir survived this, the hunter promised himself that he was going to temper that clearly self-destructive impulse right out of him, even if it took everything in his considerable arsenal. He glanced back to the entwined vampires with a furrowed brow. Alucard had mostly relaxed into the Elder’s hold; or was he slipping into unconsciousness? One of his hands still rested on the tree near his sword, while the other had curled into the auburn hair near his face to help keep Gamaliel somewhat steady despite his remaining bonds. The Elder continued to sup at his throat without notice, drawing deep, heady, mouthfuls from the growing mark on the dhampir’s shoulder and licking up the stray lines of blood that occasionally escaped onto unstained flesh.

As far as Trevor was concerned, the whole situation was becoming obscene and he was getting more and more inclined to act on his offense.

“Syph, seriously.”

“Ok!” She exclaimed, hauling herself to her feet with a groan. “I think I have it.”

“Good.” The hunter growled, snapping his whip with a satisfying crack. “Do whatever you need. I’ve got your back.”

The ritual was, in a word, curious. At first, Trevor could only continue to watch the too-intimate press of Elder and dhampir, and take note of the former as his hand began to gently caress the back of the latter. It was obvious enough to anyone watching that Gamaliel meant to entice his temporary companion, perhaps even to excite him, and that he had no intention of wasting as sensual an opportunity as this one. But then, Trevor took a moment to return to Sypha and the strange…feast…she had laid out before her. Bundles of peppercorns and dried lavender, apples that had been stored until their seeds turned black and their meat had become fragrant as brandy, and peaches that had lain in the dark for a year, thinking of the sunshine they had lost and taking on the pungent scents of dead summers that might still linger in deep recesses. Next to this, she placed pots of minced meats and salted venison. Then pickled vegetables in wax-sealed jars and a few loaves of hardtack bread purchased from the trading post.

“What the hell _is_ all that?” The hunter scowled. 

“Preserves.” The mage replied. “All dried, fermented, or otherwise conserved in state. Just as Adrian requested.”

“And…what do we do with it? Please tell me that we don’t have to eat all this!”

Sypha huffed and rolled her eyes. “No, Trev. But we are going to ‘consume’ it, so to speak.” She then grinned. “With fire!”

The incantation was not something he recognized, but that was unsurprising. There were several magical languages his family had encountered over the years and, to be honest, Trevor hadn’t learned any of them beyond recognizing a few phrases. But in a rite not unlike the ancient pastoral traditions of sacrificing the first fruits of harvest in a burning pyre, Sypha arranged the gathered foodstuffs into a makeshift altar and then ignited everything in a wash of flame. But as the spread was mostly made up of the dried, the pickled, or the preserved with alcohol, the conflagration was swift; magically reducing the last and the least of a years-ago season to ashes.

With practiced gestures, the young Speaker invoked the words of immortal sleep just as Adrian had explained them to her in their tavern room before the trap was sprung. She too had found his plan concerning of course, though for different reasons than Trevor, and even if she had found no initial fault in his logic, his proposal was dangerous and potentially fatal in more ways than one. Either way though, she was worried about the dhampir’s state now. He was limp and near lifeless, mumbling and turning as if lost in a dream.

Unbeknownst to them, he was.

Adrian felt no pain but his heart fluttered in fear. He was standing at the foot of his father’s castle, its façade looking very much like the overturned fieldstone now embedded many times in his memory. Vampires and night-creatures crawled everywhere around it and through it; disappearing and reappearing in various windows and doorways just to skitter across the stonework like a swarm of insects. The sky above was black with clouds and the cold wind swept in from an impossible height. Dapples of hoarfrost had also appeared on the grass beneath their feet, and was spreading even as he watched it, to the cornerstones near the stairs at the entrance.

Their feet. Gamaliel stood beside him. But he looked remarkably different than the figure Alucard had seen only moments prior. Instead of a pale, drawn, man with long, auburn, hair left loose to the world, he saw rather a ruddy-looking fellow with a thick braid wrapped around the back of his head in an Aramean style and the darker, olive, skin of the Levantine peoples he must have originated from. To evidence this, Gamaliel’s ideal form was also clad in simple linens with a tanned wrap across his shoulders and a band of twisted cloth over the crown of his head. He did not present here as the European aristocrat from the nightmares of previous days, but alternatively as he might have looked in life. For what reasons he might have made this choice, to Alucard at least, were unclear.

“Do you know why the undead are as savage as they are?” He queried without looking to the dhampir.

“My father says it is because they do not fear death.” Alucard replied. “That the knowledge of death is what makes a person merciful.”

Gamaliel smiled. “How very Christian of him. An image of Christ the Redeemer who is God who reduces himself to mortal death in order to offer absolution that can be brought about only when the Divine lowers himself to destruction.”

“You disagree?”

The Elder turned in the shadow of Castlevania. “It is not death, dhampir, but infirmity. Humans, from which all immortals are born, only envision eternity as one of perpetual youth, vitality, and strength. They do not imagine endless years of pain and the weaknesses brought about by old age. Do you not know that what men fear the most is the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness? That the harshest, most hateful, most abusive, of any human must eventually give up that power to become as puny and placid as a young child? I have even heard it said that the most famous generals and perpetrators of massacre, like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great, were rocked to sleep in their senescence. That elderly scholars, whose imaginings once rivaled the height of human thinking, delighted in nursery stories read to them over and over again.”

“And what is your point in all this?” Alucard countered. “That Dracula’s revenge for my mother’s execution is really some manner of misplaced anger at her mortal frailty? That he kills with impunity only because he will never experience decline or senility? That I am fated for the same because I too will outlive my natural course? This was once my home. My family. It isn’t as if I do not know what my father has done, or will do, and have defied it.”

“This is true.” Gamaliel reached up a surprisingly comforting hand to touch the dhampir’s cheek. “But his hatred and his anger which are so bountiful in the present belie the real reason for his vengeance. It is not death that plagues our kind but something far beyond it. Who cleft the Devil’s foot in the first place, Adrian?”

The dhampir scowled. “What does that have to do with…” He then trailed off as the Elder dropped his hand and began to walk across the gardens and towards the castle. As Gamaliel continued onto the first few granite stairs and towards the cathedral doors, he called out. “Where are you going?”

“To sleep.” Came the answer. “Inhume my body as you see fit. I’m sure your dear hunter will have some suitably petulant methods he will enjoy employing to that end, but I believe that _I_ shall take up residence here for the time being. You have, I admit, my curiosity. Something that has not come to pass in living memory. I should like to see where it all goes from here. Or…perhaps…when it is done, you will join me in this place. In your home. In your tomb.”

“Gamaliel!” Alucard shouted, unsure as to whether he meant to dissuade the Elder from his current course or admonish him for his words. 

“Yes, Adrian?”

“What does any of this mean?”

“It means that you are embarking on the beginning of a new and, I believe, fascinating story. One which I am very much looking forward to seeing play out as it might. But should you require a bit of advice or need a different perspective, look inward. I’m always happy to see you again.”

“You purport to live in my mind then, do you?”

“Sweet dhampir.” The Elder chuckled. “I have been in your mind for more than a year as it is. I have now merely decided to remain there. Do, however, give my regards to Trevor Belmont. He has done for you in just a few days what I could not in a hundred times as long.”

The world around him grew hazy. The dream was beginning to close in on him, but Alucard was not yet ready to let go. “And what is that? Be plain!”

The soft sound of deep laughter enveloped him in warmth and comfort, pulling him down further into oblivion. “Oh, to have again the mind of a young man.” The voice chided. “But seventy years has Heaven wound our brain-clocks, my love. The Angel of Life winds them up just once and then closes the case before he hands the key to the Angel of Resurrection. Off and running then go our wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them nor can they stop themselves. Sleep cannot still them, madness only makes them spin faster. It is Death alone that shatters the glass case and seizes the ever-swinging pendulum to silence the terrible, relentless, ticking at last.”

Further and further he descended into darkness. “There is one very sad thing with old friendships though, at least to every mind that is able to move onward. It is this: that one cannot help but hold up the first of one’s companions as the sailor uses the sea-log, to mark his progress. Every now and again though, we might throw a mate over the stern with strings of thought tied to him and look to see the rate at which the string reels off into the depths, but at the same time we forget that he is now overboard, passing beneath our bow, and drowning. But do not fret, lovely Drăculea. I merely say to you, be careful how you measure your own rate of movement against those with whom you are simply accustomed to comparing yourself. Trevor Belmont is not your precedent. And the one who is yet to come after him, is not your exemplar.”

Alucard felt like he was fighting against an undercurrent dragging him further and further from shore. The dhampir felt so unimaginably tired, so beaten down, he could hardly muster the strength to form his last words. “What is it? What is coming?”

“The Fall of Man, Adrian, was not the end.” Such soothing words, such a calming tone. “It was only the beginning. The Serpent in the Garden an honest harbinger of a new world! Your Fall is now upon the horizon! And I shall be there with you for all of it.”

A serpent? What did he mean? The Devil in Eden? …. Temptation? But to what? What unforgiveable Sin awaited?

Alucard burst awake with a terrified shout and the immediate image of Sypha Belnades sitting on him and shaking him back into consciousness.

“Adrian! Wake up!”

He sputtered but quickly came back to himself, and to the chagrin that he was, once again, splattered in blood, smeared in dirt, and lying flat on his back in a pile of leaves and moss at the side of a road. Every time, it seemed. He sat up; thankfully with enough of his wits about him so as not to completely unseat the smaller mage from his lap.

“Gamaliel?” Came the immediate query.

Trevor snorted from the background and pointed his whip to the tussocks of marsh grass growing in billows over the tree roots. There, the Elder lay. Completely and utterly passive. Unmoving as a corpse. The Catena on the ground around his feet.

Alucard helped Sypha to her feet and she in turn did the same for him. “What happened?”

“Well.” The hunter started off. “He was feeding off of you for quite a while. Pretty sure that’s going to leave a scar even for your healing. Then basically drained you to within an inch of your life while we tried to figure this ritual thing out. After that, it took me, like, fifteen minutes to pry you out of his grip. Which, let me tell you, wasn’t fun. He fucking bites, even when he’s unconscious. You should really be thanking Sypha though. She got the spell off in time before he started, you know, chewing.”

Alucard glanced across the clearing to the scorched circle that indicated where the mage had made her stand, and had destroyed the accoutrements of contagious magic in a spell only rarely used in a dozen centuries. Novalibus, or “Fallow Land;” a bit of sly old magic that had been developed by Hearth Witches to protect and maintain rotating crop fields but, in a most unexpected side effect, could also render the undead completely dormant. Especially if, like Gamaliel, they had strong ties to the land. He was lucky then that it had not rendered him similarly.

“It is done then.” He sighed, rubbing idly at the noticeable bruise on his neck. 

“Oh, yeah. I’d say your plan actually worked. Really well, even. I mean, he didn’t so much as cough when I dropped a rock on him.”

“Trevor.” Alucard scolded. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Not everything is a fight. I still say you should have let me take a crack at him, though.”

“I think you’ll find that subtle seduction is rather quite a powerful technique in getting what you want, Belmont. Much more so than always having to resort to…force.”

“Is that so.” Trevor scoffed, crossing his arms incredulously. “And why would you think such a ridiculous thing?”

“It worked on you, didn’t it?”

Sypha only sighed and went to tend to and bind their newest captive. Her two companions would just have to deal with each other as they saw fit.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following morning, Gamaliel, Eldest Among Them, Caucus Vetus, was interred in the Church of Nicăieri, in a crypt scrubbed clean of any markings of the Cross. He was left in the care of one significantly sobered and contrite Father Creţu, recently recovered from his own bout of anemic night terrors. The good father even had the decent sense to promise to look after the Elder as both a matter of caring for the wellbeing of the village generally and for ensuring that the valley proper would remain protected. A little like keeping the wolf with the sheep. What remained to be discussed by the town council, however, would be plans towards tending the Elder in perpetuity. The regional diocese was often lax in replacing elderly priests in the area, so a genealogy of Church caretakers was probably out of the question, and senior men in the township weren’t always trustworthy when it came to stakes as high as these. Sypha, however, had suggested a renewal of their ties with the upper Jewish Conclaves to the north, and as the three companions set out from the town back on the main road, they were left with the impression that her advice was likely to be followed.

In all, it was a strange end to a strange day.

“So, where to next?” The eager young mage asked, poking her head out between hunter and dhampir at the head of the wagon.

“The Belmont Hold, I think. Same as we decided way back when.”

“Excellent!” She chirped. “I, for one, am going to be very happy to see this place. And also not to have to sit in a wagon for a while.”

Alucard smiled. “Getting sore already are you?”

“Hrmph.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “Not as sore as I think you are right now. That bruise covers most of your shoulder and the bite wound is still open and oozing a little.”

“It will heal.” The dhampir sighed, but his tone was good-natured. “Just give it time.”

“Time.” Trevor side-eyed the two of them. “Something we’ve got right now I suppose. At least until we get over those mountains. The Hold is only about two days from there.”

“And then, let me guess, we’ll be enjoying the luxuriant hospitality of Clan Belmont, noblest scions of the forested realm welcoming us into their estate with grand galleries and diamond chandeliers of totally not stolen riches pillaged from the monsters of...”

“Shut up.” Trevor growled at him. “Asshole.”

“Am I now?”

“You haven’t learned a thing, have you?”

“Apparently not. But I imagine you’ll be more than happy to instruct me. Won’t you, Belmont?”

“Hng.” He sniffed. “Yeah. And just in time for lesson two. Right about now.”

The wagon ground to an unexpected halt, followed by the sound of an incensed screech.

As she returned to the interior of the wagon, Sypha was sure to grab two bottles of balm instead of one. If memory served, they were all going to need them.

**FIN**


End file.
